Sound design and mix for OpenAI’s The Builders of Our Time with Alto - a brand film about the people building with Codex. One author on the sound, first brief to final delivery.
The film is the brand piece for Codex Originals, a campaign about the people building with Codex - thinkers, tinkerers, researchers and makers. Among them: two students, one at Berkeley and one at Stanford, behind Finnie, an AI scholarship finder. An immunologist at The Jackson Laboratory assembling cancer-mutation datasets to study T-cells. A founder whose platform has kept millions of pounds of unsold inventory out of landfill. A designer who, in his words, “basically dreamed the whole flow.” None of it is staged, so none of it could sound staged.
The brief was witness, not design. Nothing in the film should sound produced; it should sound like you were in the room when it happened. So the design was built from real one-shot sounds placed on the edit points - cuts as percussion, the picture playing the drums - and pitched into the key of the score, slotted where the music runs thin. At its spine is a human pulse, tempo-mapped, that becomes the idle of an engine. Biology into machine.
Voice and dialogue were recorded with real talent, directed over the wire. Every creative decision was made by ear, in the room, by a person.
When the film went to a live event, the playback spec asked for a hard music duck under the voice. It was built, heard, and it didn’t serve the film - so two versions went out: the spec as requested, and the studio recommendation, with stems for both so the room could go further. The recommendation went to the room.