Dealership The Series
Tuesday, August 10, 2010 at 11:23PM
Grant Essig in Audio/Music, Design, Web

Dealership was a unique project for me... I initially came onto the project to create original music for the pilot episode back in something like 2006. It was a great experience and when the guys decided to create a web series out of the concept, I signed on to score the episodes.

Basically, once everything was under way, and the guys were starting to work on promoting the upcoming release, it became clear to me that they needed a designer in the mix, so I offered my services. At this point, I believed in the episodes and was obviously invested to some extent, so I wanted to do anything in my power to make the whole package 'work'.

It started as a simple website design, but eventually I was creating business cards, t-shirts and everything under the sun. The look and feel I developed even ended up influencing the title and credit sequences, which was really an honor. It was all fun, whereas few projects tend to be... and I feel like I got to contribute to something totally unique... so let's count this one as a win.

Below is one of my favorite episodes from the series, The Trip. The music turned out to be really great, but one of the most fun things I did throughout any of the soundtracks was an effect I did in this one. Not to give it all away, but the guys end up on an acid trip... so to accentuate the feeling of warped reality, I took the dialog and ran it through an analog delay, tweaking the delay time and feedback as it went. With an analog delay, when you change the delay time, the echoing audio speeds up or slows down as it decays, so it starts to sound really crazy and almost 'melty' or something. It started out only on a line here and there, but as the trip becomes more intense, I pulled the effect in more and more until it was on all the time at the end. Of course with the loudness of the chaos at the end, it's probably completely lost in there, but I like knowing it's in there.

Article originally appeared on Grant Essig | Design Music Motion (http://www.grantessig.com/).
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