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Composing sound design to be the hero

From the streets of her village to the starting line of the race track, short film The Journey – created by Don’t Panic for refugee agency UNHCR – tells a powerful story by showing just a protagonist’s running legs. The sound design team at String & Tins tell D&AD how they composed a sequence to follow her as she flees from home to escape conflict and violence. Created in collaboration with two IOC Refugee Athlete Scholarship holders, The Journey highlights the power of sport to bring hope and change for all those forced to flee.

Composing for a POV sequence

The prospect of designing a soundtrack to raise awareness of the refugee crisis would be rousing for any sound designer. Senior Audio Producer Laura-Leigh Smith tells us that the part of the brief that first captivated them was “the idea there would be one long shot… specifically of just her feet.” Without visual information such as facial expressions and body language to tell the story, there was scope for the sound design to become the hero of the piece. Smith says focusing on the protagonist’s feet helps the viewer to “identify with [her] struggle and make it universal.”

person running against backdrop of green land and evening sky — The Journey, Blacksmith

War journalism as a reference

Lead Sound Designer Joe Wilkinson likens the sounds he employed to those you could expect from a piece of journalism: “If you watch a news piece about a conflict zone, it has that raw quality where the gunshots and cries are distorted.” The direction specified that the sound be “abrasive rather than super polished” and so war films proved to be a useful reference. To complete the sensation, the sound design takes advantage of binaural processing and gives the impression of distant impacts and objects flying around the listener.

persons bare feet against a concrete floor, with trainer and food items to the side — The Journey, Blacksmith

Adding an emotional layer

The sound design masterfully communicates a sense of transience and provides a forward momentum with which to make sense of the protagonist’s changing situation. It acts as an emotional layer but, importantly, it resists telling the listener how to feel. The music is not triumphant at the end of the film and this is crucial for landing the message that the refugee crisis is an ongoing journey and struggle. Our protagonist is able to build her experience into something positive, but many are not so lucky and the sound design is a poignant reminder of just this.

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Ruinart's sustainable COLOURFORM™ packaging tells a story of luxury

A bottle of champagne, immersed in an ice bucket and wrapped in a white towel. Perhaps it’s next to a pool in the South of France. Maybe by a table in a New York restaurant. It’s one of the defining images of luxury and opulence, and an image that Ruinart wanted to capture when redesigning the packaging for its champagne: clean, chic – but crucially, eco-friendly.

COLOURFORM™ is a renewable and recyclable packaging solution that's the latest innovation from James Cropper – a pioneering papermaking company founded in 1845 in Cumbria, where the company is still based today. The COLOURFORM™ design team worked with Pusterla 1880 to develop sustainable, minimal packaging for Ruinart's champagne, titled Second Skin. Made from recycled fibrous pulp, the papier-mâché-like white mould envelopes Ruinart’s iconic silhouette, protecting the contents from UV rays and providing an elegant solution to packaging. The design has won countless accolades, and picked up two Pencils at this year’s D&AD awards – including a Yellow in Luxury Packaging Design. We spoke to Rowan Nowell, the Lead Designer on the project, and Richard Dancy, the Brand Manager at COLOURFORM™ about sustainability, the future of packaging, and the processes involved in the creation of the product.

Ruinart Champagne bottle with recycled paper packaging — COLOURFORM™ Ruinart Second Skin, COLOURFORM™ from James Cropper & Pusterla 1880

Sustainability doesn’t mean compromising on design

There’s more focus than ever on sustainable packaging, which is encouraging a shift away from the extravagant, gratuitous containers of old – so often made from plastics or other non-recyclable material – and towards a more planet-friendly future. “Throughout their long history, Ruinart have made a name for themselves as being incredibly innovative,” Dancy says. “With Second Skin, they’ve set the standard – that’s how much they’ve disrupted the market. It’s making other gift boxes look a bit grotesque; a bit too over the top.”

Sustainable thinking is at the very core of COLOURFORM™, which uses repurposed fibres to create artful and fully recyclable packaging. And because it permeates every aspect of the business, the COLOURFORM™ team can really focus on adding value to a product through design, knowing that whatever they produce will lighten the load on the environment. “From COLOURFORM™ 's perspective we don’t want the client to compromise on design”, Nowell explains. “We’re always trying to add part of the story, and use the pulp to its strengths. We just create the best design possible, and the sustainability part, from our perspective, is already sorted.”

Packaging is a vehicle for continuing the brand story

Ruinart has been producing champagne since 1729, making it the oldest established champagne house in the world. Much of the business’s success is down to the little quirks of production, such as champagne being stored in chalk cellars, or crayères. COLOURFORM™ was keen to reflect this production process in the final packaging. “The cellars keep the champagne at the perfect temperature – it’s a big part of how Ruinart stores its bottles,” Nowell says. “We tried to bring through that story, and literally put that process into their customer’s hands.”

The team at COLOURFORM™ understands that the outer shell is usually the first thing people see or touch, and in a saturated market it’s important that it instantly conveys a brand’s ethos, history, or spirit. “The future of design will increasingly be about telling your story through the packaging. Whether that be with your brand colour; or your brand texture; or the process of creating the product”, asserts Dancy. COLOURFORM™’s circular nature even means that a product could live on, and be re-used in the packaging process. As Darcy explains: “There might be a certain process that a company uses that creates a waste byproduct – we could then use that byproduct as pulp in the packaging.”

Challenges lead to the most creative innovations

The team at COLOURFORM™ went through seven different prototypes of Ruinart Second Skin before arriving at the final design. One of the big features of the packaging is its clasp, which fastens with a satisfying click – “a bit like when you close a car door” – and was, according to Nowell, an aspect that Ruinart was keen to get absolutely right. “They spent a lot of time looking at the clasp, this touch point. It might be someone’s first interaction with the Ruinart brand, so they wanted it to be really positive,” he says. The designers had to get the branding on there, but not at the expense of its sleek function. Nowell adds, “The click was really important for them. It was really challenging for us, but we really like being challenged. There’s nothing worse than feeling like there’s a little bit more to go in a project, but the customer goes ‘great, that’s fine, we’ll take it like that’. Ruinart kept pushing us back and saying, ‘okay, this is great, but we want it even better’.” Seven clasps later, and COLOURFORM™ found the perfect design.