Samsung Brand Film

In 2025, I was commissioned to create music for a brand film. The brand film in question was an internal onboarding film for Samsung to show its new employees. You know, the ones that the company shows you on your first day to really get you hyped up and emotional, like you are about to begin a great new journey in your life.

The commissioning party was a global marketing giant, HH Global.

I would be lying if I said this project didn't make me a bit nervous. Samsung is a massive company with a substantial brand presence, and I found it challenging to approach something like this with the necessary open-mindedness. 

While working on this project, I had two key people from HH Global sharing their creative vision: Torben (Creative Director) and Gabi (Not sure of her title, but excellent in what she does).

Creative Direction

At the beginning of the project, I had a lengthy discussion with Torben on the desired vibe of the music. From this discussion onwards throughout the project, I was reminded again and again how much I enjoyed listening to creative, maybe even abstract directions and translating those directions to the musical domain. 

The discussions continued with Gabi, and the summary of the directions was roughly:

• Over-edgy, epic beginning with heavy cinematic elements and a descending feeling when going down the skyscraper.
• A beat-driven electronic track, with some more melodic elements after the beginning.
• A playful part in the middle.
• Crescendo towards the end.

These bullets are what I would describe as my Tasks for this project. What really helped, along with the tasks, were some reference tracks provided by Torben and Gabi. 

Translating Brand to Music

This project proved to contain a lot of small but crucial lessons in music production for me. What do "electronic" and "playful" really mean when we talk about music? I will go through each task and how I ended up finding a solution for them.

Edgy Cinematic Beginning

This one was the easiest. I am a big fan of epic and edgy sounds, and my experience in this domain told me "big drones descending in pitch". This gave the main vibe to the beginning and continued on until we were on street level. The descent part was accompanied by a bunch of SFX-like elements that emphasize the feeling of going down. 

Beat and Electronic

Near street level, the drums fade in and set the tone and beat for the track. Along with the drums, the main bass line is introduced. The bassline is a heavily filtered Reese bass that I am a big fan of from the UK soundscape! This also plays nicely with the drone theme we set earlier.

The "electronic" part took me a while to grasp, since the majority of the music is "electronic" in some way these days. The actual origin of the sound does not necessarily invoke an "electronic" feel. For example, "Forever Young" by Alphaville starts with an iconic saw-type pad, but the initial feeling is not "Wow, this is electronic!". 

The "heureka" part of this project was discovering that a heavily arpeggiated synth gives out a major "Electric City" vibe to a track. At 0:18, you hear one of these elements play in the background. This plays along really well with Samsung and their products, and I feel this element alone is something that really ties the track to our desired feel.

Playful Break

At 0:26, we enter the playful part of the track. As with "electronic", this part was a bit of a challenge at first. However, Gabi had given me some good reference tracks where this "playful" vibe was present, and from those, I could quite quickly figure out the needed recipe: toy sounds.

Whether we call it toy sounds or kalimba, it is not my concern; it works! The kalimba sound continues the same arpeggiated theme we had going on before. 

Build Up and Crescendo

 0:38 mark introduces the beginning of our build-up towards the crescendo. I really felt that some Tron-esque type synths would work wonders during this part, since the film moves on to actual Samsung products. 

The synth is respecting some attributes we have had going on from the beginning: pitch pending. We also reintroduce the drums to drive the beat home. 

Then, at the 1:00 mark, we arrive to crescendo. Bassline comes loudly in, accompanied by a basic synth to give some harmonic elements to the part. I had a previous version where this synth played full chords, but this gave out too much of an 80's vibe to the track. I also omitted a lead melodic sound from the crescendo because it shifted the overall tonality of the track too much away from the rest of the track. 

Outro

A small touch near the end was the pulsating pluck that reveals the Samsung logo. Maybe this will catch up with Samsung and be their "sound", we will see.

Overall, I am very greatful of this commission and happy with the results. I don't think Torben and Gabi truly realize what a pleasure it was for me to work on this project! Their creative input provided fun but also challenging direction for the track, and I had all the fun chasing that.

My work was done. The track, I believe, will move on to later phases of production and will hopefully hype up some folks at Samsung in the future!