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BIM BAM: CREATIVE PROCESS FOR BRANDING BUMPER

April 29, 2020  /  Mike Hallenbeck

When the San Francisco-based Jewish educational resource provider G-dcast decided to re-brand as BimBam, they invited me to provide a musical arrangement for a new bumper to preface videos and marketing content. To start at the end, here’s the final product we came up with together:

The creative brief called for a focus on sensibilities like “refreshing”, “joyful”, “credible”, “accessible”, and “empowering”.

One specific idea thrown my way was to incorporate the sound of a spinning gragger:

Digging into my noisemaker collection, I found that I had not one but two graggers on hand. I duly incorporated one (opting for the wooden version, as opposed to the metal version demonstrated above), and we were off.

I came up with a few different ideas for the “blue sky” portion of the process. It seemed likely that we’d lean in a heavily musical direction, but there was a desire to hear some purely sound design-based material as well. Since I’m equally comfortable in both realms, I started off with a few different iterations, each displayed below. The first takes some flute samples and bends them around in arty ways; the second delves into a more conventional musical arrangement; and the third is a whimsical, purely sound effects-oriented approach:

The creative direction coalesced around making the piece more musically oriented. So I put together a few versions based on the second interation from the sequence above. V2.2 subtracts the accordion; V2.3 subtracts the rest of the melodic elements, leaving only a bass line and percussion. Hear the result of each in these three drafts below:

These iterations went over well, but eventually it was decided to use a phrase from a traditional song instead. So I took a similar approach to a different melody. This one got close:

Almost there, but the feedback was for the melody to be crisper and better defined. So I removed the accordion and swapped in a xylophone, and we had a winner. To bring us full circle, here’s the final version we heard at the top:

This was a really enjoyable project, and a chance to flex a variety of creative muscles to find just the right match. Feel free to peruse some other sound and music I’ve created for branding bumpers if you like. Thanks for your time!

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categories / branding, composition, corporate video, educational video, marketing, mix, music, music for picture, post, postproduction, production music, sound design, sound edit, sound effect, sound for picture, work sample
tags / soundedit, sound edit, sound effects, audio post, branding, marketing, brand, branded content, bumper, music, music for picture, music composition, composition, composer, composerlife, musician, sound designer, soundeditor, sound design, post, postproduction, advertising