Behind the WeavyAudio short

The film behind our home page is 40 seconds long and runs at 60 frames a second. We made it for WeavyAudio, our own music brand, and it began not with a script but with a stopwatch.

Measuring films we admire

We took launch films we think are excellent and went through them frame by frame. At 30 frames a second a frame lasts 33 milliseconds, which is the finest a picture can tell you; the sound we read in 10-millisecond slices. For every cut we measured how far it fell from the beat, and for every camera move we measured how fast it started, how long it coasted and how it settled, then fitted a curve to it.

A few rules came out of the numbers:

• hard cuts that land on the bar lines, within 35 milliseconds of the hit;
• one subject in every frame;
• words that arrive on the beat, one at a time or typed letter by letter;
• fast, eased moves between slow drifts, so the eye gets a rest.

The measuring has since grown into a library: more than 25 product films so far, each read frame by frame into one database, with every cut, every camera move and its curve, every line of type and how it enters and leaves, the grounds, and where the items sit in the frame. The newest moments in this film come from it.

Building it from WeavyAudio's own material

Its colours, its typeface (Instrument Sans, set at the same narrower width the site uses for headlines), its real Polish words, its pages and its photos all come from weavyaudio.com. For the key words we added a second face, Instrument Serif Italic, made by the same studio as Instrument Sans.

It opens on a few words in a beam of light. The record on the home page rises like a planet, and the weekly music schedule becomes a panel that builds itself line by line. The mood counter climbs to twelve and the moods orbit the title; then comes their list, each with its cover. Typed searches, "poranny trening" ("morning workout") and "wieczór w barze" ("evening at the bar"), open the venues they describe. A wall of tablets carries "Na dowolnym tablecie albo w przeglądarce." ("On any tablet or in the browser."). The licence turns into a play button, a tick and a venue card, which turns edge-on into a carousel of the eight venue templates, lit by a single key light so the card facing you is always the subject. The W tile turns into the shape that carries the end card.

The music starts a fraction of a second into the track, so that its bar lines fall exactly on the cut frames. On the finished film every hard cut measures within 5 milliseconds of its beat.

Sound made from the picture

The sound effects are generated from the film's own timeline: a low boom on every cut, a whoosh under every fast move that swells and fades with the move's own speed, a tick for each typed letter, and a bell on the final lockup tuned to the music's key. The mix is mastered to −14 LUFS.

The check that caught four mistakes

Before any film leaves us, we look at it frame by frame at full resolution. On an earlier cut of this one, that check caught four faults nobody had noticed in the preview: mirrored words showing through the backs of cards, a lit ring running through the title like a strike-through, a card cutting the name of a venue in two, and a subtitle bumping into a wider typeface. All four were fixed before anyone else saw the film.

That's what we mean by a film made with care. Press "Watch with sound" on the home page to see the result.