Red Bull Remixes the Sounds of Sport into Electronic Tracks

In 2018 Contra, a video production company in London, teamed up with Red Bull and Shure, specialists in all things audio, to create Red Bull Soundscapes – a project that challenges rising music producers to capture the sounds of Red Bull’s flagship sporting events and produce new, thumping tracks.

Along for the ride were electronic producers Anz, Shy One and HAAi who used the latest Shure MV88+ microphone to explore the audio world of Hardline in Wales, Air Race in Indianapolis and Crashed Ice in Yokohama, Japan. Contra were placed at the heart of the action in each event: from the bone crunching landings on the freeride-style jumps, to the roar of plane engines, to the slicing of ice; the team captured a huge palette of noise.

Back at the Red Bull studio, the artists used field recordings from each event to produce a track, combining and manipulating different samples of noise to create a totally unique sound. The final results were completely different; with each musician bringing their own artistic flourish to the table.

The video team matched the pace of the events by using a handheld shooting technique which adds energy and movement to the footage. They decided to shoot the high-speed action in a high frame rate for two reasons: to give them the option for dramatic slow motion in the edit and to also for the option to speed the footage back to real time with a sharp, staccato look: exactly the kind of high octane look needed for the extreme sport montage sequences.

Red Bull were looking for a solution that would allow them to make the most of these films on their social platforms. As a result, Contra produced three main films for their website and then three 15 second cut downs for Instagram. The main films were shot with a standard 16:9 ‘rectangle’ aspect ratio whilst always bearing in mind that for the social cuts, the team would chop the sides off the image to create 1:1 ‘square’ versions.

To date, Red Bull Soundscapes have received over 750k views since the Jan 8th release and had over 100k engagements.