Quiet Machines

Verso's noise cancelling is the best they have built. They wanted a film that lets you hear what it does.

A 60-second product film, packshots and loops for retail screens.

The film is built so that it works with the sound off as well as on: the picture shows the noise before it disappears, in traffic, crowds and a train pulling in. The packshots follow the same rule, with the headphones always in a busy place, never on a plinth.

The retail loops are ten seconds each and have no beginning or end, so a screen in a shop can play them for a whole day without anyone noticing the cut.

Every scene was recorded twice: once with the city's noise, once in a studio built to match it, so the sound could fall away in a single cut.

The studio set copied each street corner down to the reflections in the shop windows. Our sound team recorded the real locations at every hour of the day, so we could choose exactly how loud the world was before it went quiet.

In the mix, the silence is not empty: a breath, a heartbeat, the faint hum of the headphones themselves. We tested it in a cinema, on a laptop and on the shop speakers, and adjusted until the drop felt the same on all three.

The film became the centrepiece of the launch in 14 markets.

Retail partners asked for the loops before the launch date, and several kept them running long after the campaign had ended.

Verso's own team now uses the film to introduce the product at trade fairs, with the sound up as loud as the hall allows.