Sound design and mix for Oura’s Wear Your Best Life with nice&frank, directed by Sam Walker. One author on the sound, first brief to final delivery.
A world built entirely by hands deserved a mix built the same way. Oura’s Wear Your Best Life is a campaign of :60, :30, :20 and :15 films, set in a one-tenth-scale city built in Prague by thirty-five model-makers in three weeks and shot in two days. Twelve sets, eight working cars, a twenty-foot street, a subway with its lights on, a rooftop pool filled with real water. The city is inhabited by real hands - fourteen hand dancers from fourteen countries, walking, skating, swimming - with no dialogue and no spoken word anywhere. That puts the whole story on the picture and the sound. The brief was to keep the world real at every distance: the street is a real street, the pool is real water, and the only small thing is the hand. The mix lives in three depths, near, far and hand, and moves between them without ever announcing it.
The ring is heard only when it touches something. A tick at the contact, never a footstep, never a sting. Under it runs a layer of people who never speak - breath, shuffle, presence - so the city feels inhabited rather than scored. The agency’s working title was the Handthem, a handmade anthem about life, and the sound was built to that word. Every sound placed by hand, because every frame was.