How to Mix Sound for Incredible Branded Content
Dubbing Mixer and Sound Designer David Bartley lifts the hood of this Ralph Lauren film, showing how this branded content soundtrack was crafted to befit the luxury brand’s exacting values
Branded content comes in many different guises.
In the film above, a young influencer car nut drives a Jaguar E-Type to Goodwood Revival. He just happens to be wearing Ralph Lauren.
While most branded content can feel quite… forced, there is something the way Ralph Lauren communicates its values through its content that is effortless and engaging. I think they are quite peerless in the way they do this.
I’ve been working on the brand for about a year now. I’ve seen Ralph Lauren create all sorts of different styles of video which are immediately lapped up by hundreds of thousands of adoring fans.
This is branded content, done right.
From a sound perspective, as with other departments, it is challenging to work on a luxury brand. Expectations are of course, high.
Scrutiny is huge – every detail is pored over by a lot of people. The soundtrack must be powerful, but not overbearing, perfectly balanced, detailed with foley but not overcrowded. Authenticity is everything. So every single sound you place must be real and accurate. Under no circumstances can anything ever sound harsh.
Noisy dialogue cheapens any film
Since noisy dialogue immediately cheapens any film, for a luxury brand the dialogue must be clean as a whistle.
Yet most of these films feature influencers and high profile celebrities talking in very noisy environments – driving in an open top 60 year old sports car, at the US Open, or Wimbledon, or at Paris Fashion Week.
The biggest thing with noise removal isn’t so much removing the noise but avoiding the introduction of artefacts at the same time. If you’ve ever been on a Zoom call, you will know what I am referring to!
So, there’s a bit of an art to cleaning up dialogue while keeping a natural tone.
Having a good ear for these sounds is a big part of it. Knowing which tools to use and when is another. Advances in technology help a lot and over the years, I’ve built up a small arsenal of noise reduction software, and honed my experience in using them. Five of these tools, from different vendors, are powered by AI.
As with anything, you need the right tool for the job, and the trick is knowing which tool you need. Often, a combination of tools is needed, and the order in which you do things becomes quite important.
With the dialogue now cleaned up you have the ability to shape the sound of it. So it’s now possible to push the volume of it at will, without being restricted by background noise. But having removed all the ambience, it’s time to put it back in, rebuilding it to create an authentic soundtrack.
Adding ambient sounds back in
While the car sounds while they’re driving were captured on location, most other sounds you hear in this film were not recorded at the time. For example, the racing at Goodwood Revival, countryside ambience, foley, glass clinks, tools, map, crowd noise etc. These sounds were added by me, either recorded as foley bespoke for this film, taken from recordings I’ve made on location elsewhere, or sought from my extensive libraries of licenced sound effects – currently running to over 200,000 sounds, around 1.5TB, The remainder were recorded on location.
Of course, if I’ve done my job well, no-one should really appreciate the soundtrack, or think of how much work and thought went into shaping it. The viewer should only be engaged with the film.
I would like to say a big thank you to London based content agency Knock Knock for creating these incredible films, and trusting me to work on their projects over the last year.
David Bartley AMPS is a freelance Dubbing Mixer and Sound Designer based in London, England.
You can see more examples of his work here.