Sidi Ali – Dancing Robot

• Sound Design
• Foley
• Mix

“Imagine if Apple made a robot 20 years from now. What would it sound like?”

That was the brief on this ad for the mineral water company Sidi Ali, produced by Partizan and directed by Michael Gracey. With that in mind, we avoided traditional mechanical robot sounds, looking for something softer, smoother, more elegant.

We set to work recording a bespoke library of air-based sounds, much of it centred around a simple bicycle pump. A finger over the valve while pressing the handle gave us the soft impact of the robot’s footsteps. For body movements, we layered up multiple recordings of the pole sliding in and out of the pump, manipulating them until we achieved the desired sounds.