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Client: Personal Project · Partner: Jesseter Wang, Buck · Sound Design: Penrose Audio — Davies Aguirre
Motion designer Jesseter Wang at Buck brought us in to create sound design for a personal holiday animation — a short, warm piece built around the visual and emotional language of the winter season. The brief was open: capture the feeling of the holidays without leaning on cliché. Gentle, genuine, a little playful.
Holiday sound design lives and dies by restraint. The instinct is to reach for the familiar — sleigh bells, swelling brass, the full orchestral arsenal — but that path leads to a piece that sounds like background music for a department store. We were more interested in the texture of the season: the hush of fresh snow, the way cold air makes sound feel closer and more intimate, the small domestic warmth of a shared celebration.
We thought of the piece less as a holiday commercial and more as a short film — something that deserved a sound world shaped around its specific visual rhythm rather than borrowed from a seasonal playlist.
The harmonic centerpiece is a set of soft holiday chimes — tuned to sit in the upper-mid register without harshness, played with felt mallets to give each note a rounded, warm decay. Rather than writing a melodic line, we used these chimes to mark visual beats and transitions, allowing their natural resonance to carry across cuts and create continuity. Subtle jingle layers were threaded beneath, pitched down and processed with light tape saturation to take the edge off their brightness.
The ambient layer was built from recorded and synthesized sources. The crunch of compressed snow was recorded at multiple pressure levels and layered to create a tactile texture that responds to movement. A gentle winter breeze — filtered through a high shelf to remove low rumble — runs as a near-subliminal bed through the piece, giving the atmosphere a sense of temperature without dominating the mix. The goal was air: the sensation of cold space around the warmth at the center of the frame.
Jesseter's animation has a characteristic smoothness — fluid movement with clean arcs and well-timed eases. We matched this with soft whoosh and swipe textures: short bursts of filtered white noise shaped with fast attacks and slow decays, sitting just above the noise floor. These give each transition a physical presence without drawing attention to themselves. The festive orchestral flourishes were kept sparse — a French horn swell here, a pizzicato string accent there — to preserve the intimacy of the overall texture.
The final sound design sits close and quiet, matching the scale of the animation without trying to expand it into something larger. The chimes and environmental textures create a sense of place — cold outside, warm within — and the transition sound work supports Jesseter's motion without competing with it. A small piece that sounds like one: carefully made, unhurried, genuinely warm.