Working on our showreel we really came to appreciate the power of music when laid over the top of a strong graphics piece. Our showreel originally used “Sing Sing” by Emmanuelle and UltraOrange , which is a great piece of music and worked superbly, but we decided we needed to promote a friend of ours (The Alexis Forge Project) so we scoured their back catalogue and found a piece that fit just as well if not better. With a bit of fine tuning and editing of the graphics the new version works really well (and is still the highest trafficked part of our site).

So bearing this in mind, just how powerful good sound design is, I’ve scoured the net to find some great uses of music over graphics, either ads or end movie titles…..enjoy.

I love the end scenes of the Bourne Movies and how they introduce Moby’s “Extreme Ways” into the titles. The final episode, The Bourne Ultimatum took the original premise of the last 2 movies (with the extended ligatures of the text moving from one name into another) but combined graphics from the journey Bourne took throughout the movie - via airports, train stations and road maps finally ending on an interpretation of Matt Damon’s face. Watch it without the music then with the music...

The Lloyds ad has music by Elena Kats-Chernin and works really well over the 3D character animation, listening to an interview with her she was really pleased with the ad but admitted that if she had been asked to compose for the visuals she would probably never have come up with the same piece of music for those graphics…

Along the same vein this ad for Nissan uses classical music in an urban environment to “Play with the city”, whereas they could have used a more modern soundtrack they took the opposite approach and it works really well.

If you’ve got any more great uses of sound design and graphics let me know.