How Creativity Squared Circles in Swatch’s ‘What If’ Spot
It often goes unnoticed but a lot of our world is made up of all things round. Wheels, plates, round-abouts, records, doughnuts, planets, watch faces - the list goes on. Swatch decided to boldly envision what a world where round becomes square might look and sound like. The result is the ‘What If’ spot, filled with familiar objects now rendered square. The idea was executed by director Dan French and produced by Sticker Studios. Jungle handled the sound while tenthree worked on the editing. Everyone’s contribution was essential in making the outlandish idea come true while giving it a sense of whimsy, with touches like the AI-generated rap about geometrical shapes that’s lightly hidden in the soundtrack.
Sticker Studios’ EP, Luke Brookner, calls this spot a ‘bullseye’ for him and the team as it brought together a real creative challenge and the freedom from the client to make something spectacular. On the sound side, Jungle’s sound designer Luke Isom had to figure out how a square world (filled with square basketballs, square records, and square bikes) sounds compared to a round one. He confesses that it was “pretty hard to get the correct level of square into the world.” The challenges didn’t stop there as Luke decided to add some realism by grounding his sound design in the actual sound of ticking Swatch watches. Armed with a microphone, he headed to the brand’s Carnaby Street store to get the recordings to include in the spot. Beth Roberts, editor at tenthree, worked editing magic to establish the rhythm of the bizarre world, sometimes working with takes as short as 14 seconds.
Today, we chatted to Luke Isom, Beth Roberts, and Luke Brookner about working on the spot, the creative challenges they solved, and why it was all worth it in the end.
LBB> So, what was the brief from Swatch for this new campaign?
Luke Brookner, EP> The iconic watch brand Swatch came to Sticker looking for a fresh approach for their new Square watches – a film that captured the young energy of the brand. They wanted something fun, surprising, and playful that could appeal to a gen z audience – cue ‘think of as many things as you can to turn from circle to square’! It was a lot of fun. The script was playful and the client was collaborative so it was the perfect project.
Luke Isom, sound designer> Obviously briefs come to us a little later in the process but when I got the WIP my brain basically melted, for the first couple of viewings, with possible ideas and inspiration. In terms of the sound brief, we wanted to aim for a super believable and enveloping sound track that pulled you into this slightly alternative universe where all circles are square. So, apart from the specific “square” moments, most of the audio is very grounded in reality.
Beth Roberts, editor> When Dan [French] came to me with the idea, it was super early stages of the project as it usually is with us. We discuss potential jobs pretty early on. He’d started with a log line from Swatch and came up with the whole concept, even at this stage he was insanely detailed about the ideas he had. I thought it was a pretty damn clever creative. It felt big, dynamic and really exciting. I thought this had the potential to be his biggest film yet, and it really is...until his next one.
LBB> The spot has some brilliant easter eggs – how did you use sound to play into that?
Luke Brookner, EP> Sound and sound design were extremely important in punctuating the piece. Moving through the eras, the music was extremely important in placing viewers in that time. Beyond that, sound design was the glue. The picture was so rich with gags and there was so much VFX trickery that I think sound design helped to sell it to the viewer.
Luke Isom, sound designer> Well... I don’t know how many of the visual easter eggs you spot, but believe me – there are a fair few square-shaped audio eggs kicking about too! We made sure to weave in various cheeky spoken audio and sound effects.
For example, during the basketball game, instead of hearing ‘pass the ball’ there’s a fun little ‘pass the cube’ in there. When the DJ is scratching his square records and hitting a sample pad, I actually added a custom sample saying ‘square, square’. Originally there wasn’t anything there sound wise but I managed to fit the music in time to the DJ’s hand motions.
Another fun audio egg, in this scene – you can hear the director Dan spitting some bars over the track. He actually got an AI to quickly come up with a rap about squares. We had 10 minutes left so he just hopped in the booth and tracked them down and they made it all the way through into the final spot.
There were a LOAD of these super small, square throwbacks woven in which just help add to the fun of the whole spot.
LBB> Beth, tell us about your editing process. How did you help to establish the spot’s fast-paced cubic rhythm?
Beth Roberts, editor> It was an enormous balancing act. The schedule was tight and the length of the spot was only finalised late in the process which for the editing created a domino effect that was definitely a challenge. Crucially the narrative up front had to be quick for people to see all the tricks but if it had been too quick, the story wouldn’t have made anywhere near enough sense for the audience to get the gags.
LBB> Luke [Isom], you mentioned much of the sound was rooted in reality but was there anything wildly different to its round-sounding counterpart?
Luke Isom, sound designer> Oh yes, it was definitely a balance with the sound in order to get just the right amount of square into the world. The square bike was a big one – on my first few passes, it was sounding very much like a mini caterpillar track but it was a bit too jarring to be believable. I ended up blending this track with a track of standard bicycle gears to make it seem recognisable as an object.
LBB> How closely did you work with the producer, Ed, and the director, Dan, on the sound and editing?
Luke Isom, sound designer> Dan’s great in both giving me a very in depth brief of his audible visions. We had a couple of sessions we sat in together. Luckily, I think we’re on the same wavelength most of the time and ended up liking and agreeing on most aspects of this spot.
Beth Roberts, editor> Dan and I work a lot back and forth, super collaboratively. He’s used to being super hands-on from when he had to cut himself and I don’t discourage that, so things go to him and come back to me a fair bit. Usually, he throws some ideas together in time away from the suite. Then I take that and finesse it. The pull back shot out of our narrative scene, the one that moves us into our square world section, was actually built by Dan himself!
LBB> What were the biggest challenges you had to apply creative problem solving to on this project?
Luke Brookner, EP> Production-wise, Sticker is known for taking challenging budgets and turning them into gold. This was a hugely ambitious shoot with a tricky budget that involved a local service production in Barcelona, FPV drones, VFX worlds and A-probe lens on a Steadicam going through a doughnut so it was perfect.
Every shot on the three-day shoot was a technical conundrum – from how do we recreate the bounce of a football, to shutting down some Barcelona’s busiest streets to have a Segway go through a doughnut or how to physically recreate time breaking apart to transition into VFX. There were a lot of moments in the shoot that required a very skilled and technical team.
Once we were out of the shoot, the gluing together was fun but challenging. Tricky VFX shots and our in-house VFX team in London and one in Prague worked together to build assets for a tight timeline. Working to a two-month delivery post shoot was challenging but it meant fast, clear communication with both the client and our team internally.
Luke Isom, sound designer> From a sound-perspective the biggest challenge was the sheer vastness of it: It’s one of those projects that you could spend half a year on if you had the time for it so we had to work fast and make decisions quicky. But also the really important part of this from a sound perspective was to make it sound equivocally Swatch. I actually went down to the Swatch shop on Carnaby Street and very politely asked them if I could record some of their watches. (Still think they must have thought I was nuts). I took along a little contact microphone which works by clamping onto objects and records audio created by the physical vibration coming from the object. For example, the hands ticking within a watch. It was important to have recordings of some genuine Swatch watches as they have a distinctive tick that we made sure to run throughout the ad.
Beth Roberts, editor> There were quite a few, as you can imagine, as the piece is jam-packed. The main one was the one-shot street take, with all the square elements and character blocking. The quickest take we had was 14 seconds long! So there are subtle ramps up and down throughout the entire take. It was a precise balancing act and we really wanted to retain the integrity of how everything was originally intended as much as possible.
LBB> What was your favourite part of working on the spot?
Luke Isom, sound designer> For me it was the collaboration on ideas that I loved most… Dan’s square rap and I have to thank my colleague Mr Chris Southwell for throwing in the idea for the ‘pass the cube’ and the ‘square, square’ sample I mentioned earlier. It’s definitely been one of my favourite spots to work on by far.
Beth Roberts, editor> I really enjoyed the challenge of it all, the time pressure, the technicals, the pacing challenges. There's a thirty second version knocking around somewhere (with everything in it) that actually... somewhat worked? When I got the rushes I was convinced it wasn't going to be remotely possible and we managed it, the whole thing was a huge win to be honest.
Luke Brookner, EP> It’s always fun in the planning stage, sitting in the office thinking of different square things. Once we were in production it was also great watching the teams recreate different eras: Propping a ‘90s bedroom or ‘00s street and seeing it all come to life! This was a bullseye brief for Sticker, lots of VFX, a gen-z target audience and a client who wanted to push the boundaries. We loved collaborating with Swatch, who wanted to be brave, who wanted the work to stand out and was prepared to trust us to know the audience and find the right director.
