References — Sound tracks design

In designing the sonic environment for our short film—a surreal, darkly comedic story where a young couple cheats a taxi driver only to reveal it was all a dream—I was drawn to references that captured psychological instability, urban alienation, and the emotional weight of class anxiety. These reference points not only shaped the texture and structure of my sound design but also deepened my understanding of how sound can embody themes of aimlessness, deception, and fantasy. By weaving together techno synthesisers and strings, I aimed to reflect the inner worlds of China’s working-class youth living under pressure, stuck between survival and delusion.

Uncut Gems, Daniel Lopatin

Lopatin’s score is a masterclass in building tension through synthetic textures. It avoids traditional emotional cues and instead uses looping, layered synths that create a sense of breathless forward motion. The music never gives the listener relief—mirroring the protagonist’s gambling addiction and desperate lifestyle.

This chaotic, claustrophobic aesthetic resonated with our film’s themes of risk, obsession, and fantasy as escapism. I borrowed Lopatin’s technique of using layered arpeggios and pulsing synthesisers to reflect how my characters mentally spiral through the idea of “one big score” that will fix everything.

Lopatin’s ability to sonically reflect urban pressure and mental breakdown inspired me to move away from emotional melodies and instead embrace disorientation and overload as narrative tools. I used fast, repetitive synth motifs that grow increasingly unstable as the characters’ dream develops—suggesting their reality is slipping.

Enter the Void, Thomas Bangalter et al.

Gaspar Noé’s film stands out for its fluid transitions between consciousness, hallucination, and memory—achieved in part by deeply immersive, often disorienting sound design. The soundtrack uses slow, sweeping bass tones and heavily processed ambient textures to dissolve spatial boundaries.

This approach inspired the sound design for the dream-reality blurring in my film. Rather than marking the dream with obvious cues, I subtly introduced reverb-heavy textures and irregular tempo shifts that destabilize the perception of time and space.

I used low-frequency drones, reversed synth tails, and granular processing—techniques I observed in Enter the Void—to reflect a dream state that doesn’t feel magical, but rather uncanny and unresolved. This parallels how my characters’ fantasy is seductive but ultimately ungrounded.