In late 2018, the Irish Examiner ran a series of print ads, highlighting historical and cultural events in Irish history. The campaign was designed to remind the readers that while the paper had changed ownership, its purpose would remain the same – quality journalism.
I was comissioned to create an immersive sound design experience as part of a campaign which ran in parallel with print illustrations specially comissioned and run in the paper itself. The advertisement, unlike the illustrations, were completely absent of picture – instead they used animated type to communicate the messaging behind the spot, and I created sound design to accompany those scenarios.
The trick lay in blending inherently juxtapoed settings together.
The first spot saw the roar of a lion blending against the rumbling start up engine of heavy duty contrustion vehicles, a cacophany of anvils, cranes and drills driving to the climactic heights of the boom, only to collapse into a deserted landscape of stagnant economic progress, signified by the ‘crash’ of glass, and the sceech and swooping of vulture funds.
The second was the juxtaposition of war and celebration – the interesting thing here was that war and celebration often don’t sound inherently different, both being exclamations of emotion on some level, so a bit of research was required to get this one right. Due to their close proximinty in time, I researched the weapons most commonly used in both The Rising and also the Civil War, so that the soundscape would represent a true and accurate representaiton of gunfire from that time – primarily sporadic non-automatic weaponry. The animation is also punctuated by an artillery explosion, representing the 18 pounder artillery used by The Helga, the gunship that shelled Liberty hall in 1916, the immediate precursor to the Civil War. The landscape moves into modern times and marks the celebration of the evolution of civil partnership laws, a change that was campaigned for on the very same streets in Dublin.
To tie the executions together, I also created a brand mnemonic which was demonstrates a resolve towards unbiased media regardless of the circumstance. Melodically the music is neither major or minor, a nod to balanced objective journalism.
