Bringing Chinese New Year Animation to Life with Sound

Client: Personal Project · Partner: Jesseter Wang & Hannah Sun, Buck · Sound Design: Penrose Audio — Davies Aguirre

Project Context

This project began as a personal collaboration with motion designers Jesseter Wang and Hannah Sun at Buck — a cel-animated short celebrating the Year of the Rabbit. The ask was straightforward: bring the piece to life with a sound world that felt culturally grounded, festive, and alive with the energy of a New Year celebration.

Conceptual Approach

Before touching a fader, we spent time with the visual language of the piece — the bold color fields, the rhythmic snap of the transitions, the way Jesseter and Hannah had choreographed movement as a kind of visual percussion. The sound needed to honor that rhythm without shadowing it. We wanted listeners to feel the warmth of the celebration the way you feel it standing outside a crowded street: the texture of distant drums in your chest, the sharp glint of a cymbal cutting through cold air.

Authenticity was the organizing principle. Chinese New Year has a specific sonic identity — one with centuries of association and emotional memory. Our job was to handle that material with care, using traditional percussion not as decoration but as the structural spine of the piece.

The Work

Traditional Percussion as Architecture

The foundation of the sound design is built on traditional Chinese percussion: lion dance drums, hand-hammered cymbals, and large festival gongs. These were layered not simply for cultural flavor, but because they share a rhythmic language with the animation's own timing — sharp accents landing on visual cuts, resonant decay filling the spaces between motion. The low-frequency bloom of a festival drum was tuned to arrive slightly ahead of each major transition, giving the edit a sense of physical weight.

Ambient Texture and Spatial Depth

Beneath the percussion, we built a layered ambient bed that suggests a specific place and time of year: crowd murmur threaded with the distant pop and crackle of firecrackers, the soft flicker of lantern light rendered as barely-audible cloth rustling and candle breath. These elements were pushed low in the mix — present but never foregrounded — creating the spatial impression of a celebration just beyond the frame.

Chimes, Transitions, and Sync

Brass chimes and metallic ringing tones were woven through the piece to mark visual beats and accent color transitions. Each chime hit was tuned to complement the harmonic content already present in the drums, keeping the overall texture coherent rather than cluttered. The sync work here was deliberate: rather than matching every single motion event, we identified the five or six moments that most needed sonic punctuation and let the rest breathe.

Results

The finished piece carries the warmth and specificity of a real celebration — grounded in recognizable cultural sound while serving the visual storytelling. The percussion anchors each scene without overwhelming the delicate ambient layers underneath, and the sync points feel earned rather than mechanical.

Some sounds need no translation — they land in the body before the mind has time to interpret them.