The third piece of four 5 minute sound design pieces created for my final university professional practice portfolio. I received 1st Class Honours for my work across all four sound design pieces.

Undetectable Box is a Chinese 2D indie animated short film that involves a blurred line between reality and the main character’s imagination as he is often lost in daydreams of his love’s imaginarily extraordinary life. 

In approaching this piece, I considered Brad Bird’s phrase regarding The Incredibles 2 being “a dance between the mundane and the fantastic”. To establish this sonically, I put an immense care into building the piece’s ambiences to create a convincing sonic reality rooted in realism, similar to my piece for BCS. When building the layers for these atmospheres, I panned many small elements such as birds chirping (2:46), children talking off-screen in a school staircase (3:17) and gentle hums in the main character's bathroom (0:35) to improve the world’s immersiveness.

The realistic ambiences amplify the contrast between them and the actions that take place within the protagonist’s imagination, which feature far more emphasised sounds such as the girl’s sword swings (2:26). I did not lean into many surreal sounds for impacts, such as DMC3’s anime inspirations; each emphasised sound was approached with the same blurred line between reality and imagination displayed by the visuals. The sword clashes (4:24) sound alike real swords but were provided a heightened weight through large whooshing sounds, preventing the audience from inferring what was real and what was not.

Similar to how my piece for DMC3 exuded extra characterisation through actions’ sonic accentuation, I believed the overemphasis of certain sounds could be used to conjoin the viewer with the boy’s own psuedo-imaginary reality. A few sounds were designed to fall outside the realm of blurred reality and into the extraordinary; the gun’s blast (4:07) elicits no blast sound and instead merges a bass drop with a shining noise to emphasise the action’s extremity with the idea that time is standing still. Additionally, while waiting beside the girl, while the boy’s eyes are made to sound like stone being pushed (2:19) to create a comedic contrast between such minor actions feeling like they have an immense weight due to his emotions; a common motif in the original short film.

I composed most of the music and ditties within the piece, usually utilising Chinese percussion in order to culturally abide by sound design tropes present in East Asian animation. 

I composed a short love theme to play during the section inside the classroom (1:30); it utilises a reverberant piano and bass to provide a reflective atmosphere as the boy questions why he’s enraptured. The classroom’s ambience fades during the piece to imply how the boy’s focus is entirely on the girl; it returns as the piece ends and the boy is brought back from his daydream, once again sonically connecting the boy’s perception of reality with the viewer’s.

I also utilised They Long To Be (Close To You) by The Carpenters later during the piece, leading up to and during the fight scene (3:40). Considering the song revolves around being entranced by an unrequited love, I believed it fit the Undetectable Box’s overarching narrative to a greater extent than the original clip’s alt rock composition. The song’s name and chorus also enjoys a situational link with the boy being so physically distant from the girl - he longs to be close to her. The song’s tempo was edited to synchronise with the scene’s action.