I also add some Tanzanian local food, local people and others’ clips into KFC in the video, WHY?
Placing Tanzanian food scenes alongside KFC scenes highlights the deep cultural and material differences between local and corporate food practices:
Local food involves care, time, community, and tradition—often prepared by hand, using natural ingredients.
KFC food represents speed, standardisation, and commercial efficiency—a highly processed, franchised product optimised for global uniformity.
This juxtaposition exposes not only economic inequality, but also epistemological conflict: two very different ways of knowing, valuing, and engaging with food.
From an audio branding perspective, these edits act as visual dissonance to the smooth, polished sound world of the KFC brand. The KFC audio motifs are designed to evoke comfort, appetite, and familiarity. But when they’re overlaid with sudden shots of earthy, smoky, hand-prepared Tanzanian meals, the brand sound becomes inappropriate, even absurd.
This editing choice breaks the illusion created by the audio branding: that this food is neutral, global, and culturally unproblematic.
I made this video into less vibrant – green style, which make the food looks like poisoned and a bit similar to roberty – industrial vibe. What’s the point of it? Why is it related to the audio branding? What am I wanna talking about in that way? Why did I add the monkey at beginning?
A key design element in the video is its desaturated green-toned color palette, which evokes a sterile, almost toxic or artificial atmosphere. This visual treatment was deliberately chosen to distort the typical sensory appeal found in food advertising. Instead of using high-saturation imagery that emphasizes freshness, abundance, and desire—hallmarks of corporate food visuals—this video subverts that expectation by making the food appear unappetizing, processed, and even dangerous.
Opening with the Monkey (Metaphor) The video opens with a shot of a monkey—a symbolic gesture that can be interpreted as a metaphor for human imitation, absurdity. This sets a tone of critical distance and playfulness. The monkey becomes a subtle reference to the way global systems observe, mimic, and often exploit local cultures while remaining detached.
I want to convey this perspective. We observe the monkeys who are living in the wild as if they were animals in a zoo, but no one knows who the monkeys are actually.
Visual Aesthetic & Editing Analysis
Poisoned Consumption: By draining warmth from the colour of the food, the visuals symbolically suggest that what’s being consumed isn’t nourishment, but something toxic—culturally, economically, and physically. It critiques the industrial food system promoted by global brands like KFC, where food is detached from its cultural and nutritional roots and repackaged as a commercial product.
Robo-Industrial Aesthetic: The greenish, metallic tone echoes the colour schemes of factory interiors, fluorescent lighting, and industrial surveillance footage. This gives the video a robotic, systematised, dehumanised feeling, aligning with the mechanised soundscape of KFC’s audio branding. The editing rhythm also enhances this: tight cuts, repetitive visual cycles, and alignment with branded jingles suggest an automated process that lacks the human, communal, and sensory richness of traditional food practices.
Visual-Audio Dissonance: This stylistic choice amplifies the contrast between the visual and sonic elements. KFC’s upbeat, clean, and polished audio branding is made to feel hollow or even eerie when placed over these muted, “contaminated” images. Instead of reinforcing appetite or comfort, the branded sounds become ironic—disconnected from the grim visual tone, exposing the artificial optimism baked into audio branding strategies.
Critique of Global Branding Logic: The video, through its colour grade, rejects the polished global branding logic that aims to create uniformity across cultures. Fast food chains like KFC rely heavily on both visual and audio branding to build environments that feel the same in New York, London, or Arusha. By intentionally disrupting this visual harmony and creating a surreal, almost sickly tone, your video resists the illusion of comfort and sameness. It emphasises the unnaturalness of this global aesthetic, especially when it’s forcibly applied to contexts like Tanzania.
Media Poison as Conceptual Strategy: There’s also an underlying commentary on the psychological and cultural effects of media saturation. The green hue becomes a metaphor for the contamination of perception—how repetitive corporate imagery and sound branding can dull critical awareness and aesthetic diversity, replacing local expressions with homogenised, branded experience.
About Audio Branding?
The visual approach, which is desaturated and “poisoned,” is directly linked to the fundamental criticism of audio branding as a means of sensory manipulation. While sound in advertising usually serves to amplify pleasure, trust, and desirability, this project uncovers the disjunction between sound and meaning—illustrating how a cheerful jingle can obscure damaging truths.
I reinterpret the meaning of the audio: the KFC jingle now feels mechanical and ironic rather than comforting.
I reveal how sound can be turned into a weapon — utilised to mitigate or obliterate harsh realities regarding labor, inequality, or cultural degradation. My proposition is that audio branding serves not only as an aesthetic element but also as a means of ideological control. It functions alongside visual branding to produce a misleading sensory coherence.
This video project emerged from my broader research into audio branding and its cultural implications, particularly within non-Western contexts. My goal was to investigate how corporate sound design—specifically the iconic audio branding of KFC—interacts with and disrupts local sonic and visual cultures, using irony, contrast, and collage as key strategies.
The process began during my time in Arusha, Tanzania, where I observed the real-life presence of KFC as a global brand embedded within a local economy.
As I heard the CISA’s creative project, this idea came out from my brain: I want to make a experimental video of KFC and focusing on the audio branding.
In the editing process, I intentionally crafted a strong contrast between the slick, upbeat sound of KFC’s audio branding and the raw, grounded imagery of Tanzanian food practices. I opened the video with a shot of a monkey, acting as a surreal and ironic metaphor—possibly representing outsider observation, mimicry, or primal consumption—and layered it with KFC’s cheerful jingle to immediately create tension and disorientation.
A key visual decision was to desaturate the color palette, giving the footage a muted green, almost toxic tone, which evoked a post-industrial, artificial aesthetic. This made the KFC food appear lifeless or even “poisoned,” in contrast to the vibrancy and care found in local cooking. The aim was to visually undermine the appetizing intent of corporate branding and reflect on how branding distorts reality, especially when detached from local context.
Sonically, I created a layered mix of KFC audio branding and traditional African music, allowing them to clash and bleed into each other. This hybridized soundscape questioned the dominance of global brand identity over indigenous sound worlds. I also edited in local food clips into KFC cooking scenes, deliberately disrupting the coherence of the branded narrative and suggesting a cultural contamination or resistance—a visual way to expose the tensions between global corporate identity and local cultural practice.
The project became both a critique and a provocation—questioning the role of audio branding as a form of soft power, and exploring how sound and image can be used to expose invisible systems of influence embedded within global commerce.
This video project critically explores the role of audio branding in shaping cultural narratives and global hierarchies through sound. By creating an ironic KFC advertisement using a mixture of branded audio, symbolic imagery, and contrasting food preparation scenes, the work questions how multinational brands embed themselves sonically and visually in post-colonial contexts. Filmed in Arusha, Tanzania—where a real KFC outlet operates—the video situates its critique within a specific local environment while referencing broader global issues.
Rooted in my research on audio branding, this work investigates how sound design in corporate identity (such as jingles, tonal motifs, and rhythmic cadences) reinforces not only brand recognition but also implicit values like speed, convenience, modernity, and aspirational consumption. In the case of KFC, these sonic tools are used to construct a comforting and familiar world of fast food culture that deliberately masks the inequalities it is built on—economic disparity, cultural displacement, and environmental impact.
By recontextualizing KFC’s branded sound within Tanzanian daily life, the video intentionally disrupts its intended function. Through ironic audio-visual contrast, the project critiques how these branding strategies overwrite local realities.
Tom Sachs – Consumer Culture and DIY Branding Aesthetics
Tom Sachs is known for recreating high-end branded objects (like McDonald’s, Chanel, NASA) using crude, handmade methods—deconstructing their perfection and exposing their constructed mythology. His installations often include sound elements, whether it’s the audio of a faux-McDonald’s kitchen or the background hum of industrial tools, creating an immersive brand-space gone wrong.
Sachs’s work shares my interest in de-fetishizing branding, turning clean corporate environments into messy, ironic, critical zones.
His tactile rebranding techniques parallel my sonic rebranding—where I remix KFC’s audio to clash with Tanzanian visuals.
Sachs also critiques how brands infiltrate identity and aspiration, something my video exposes through the contrast between fast food sound design and real-life local conditions.
Jake and Dinos Chapman – McDonald’s–Themed Sculptural Works
While the Chapman brothers’ work focuses primarily on visual iconography, their use of McDonald’s imagery speaks to the pervasive branding of culture, where logos and corporate symbols become religious, political, or philosophical objects. Though not strictly sonic, their work implies that branding operates across all sensory registers—visual, tactile, and by extension, auditory.
The Chapmans use dark irony and cultural corruption to critique capitalism—methods you employ in your video through visual metaphor (like the monkey in my video) and ironic sound layering.
Their art reveals how brand symbols mask violence and control, which connects to your theme of how KFC’s jingle masks inequality and local erasure.
They invite the audience to reconsider familiar icons, which mirrors your remixing of branded sound into an unsettling context.
This advertisement serves as a poignant illustration of modern audio branding at work.
It takes the legendary “I’m Lovin’ It” jingle—possibly one of the most well-known sonic logos in the world—and reinterprets it from a classical music perspective, transforming it into a classic orchestral motif. This illustrates the flexibility, cultural nature, and deep manipulativeness of sound design, which can recode brand identity across generations and geographies.
It highlighted the emotional power and adaptability of branded sound, which I echoed by reusing KFC’s branded audio out of context.
The orchestral twist in the ad shows how audio branding works across cultural codes, which parallels your use of African music against the KFC soundscape.
My ironic video takes this polished manipulation and deconstructs it, revealing the ideological force behind those same audio tactics.
All the dialogues of the main characters in the film were recorded live, because we wanted to retain the imperfect texture and background sound of the live recording.
the film works is so different than the Sound works, there is not that big among every version I designed and created for this film, such as reducing chords, deleting music tracks, and fading the high-frequency sound. And the final result is that each version becomes simpler and simpler.
The sound design process for this film was highly conceptual and emotionally driven. At the start, my main goal was to use sound not just as background, but as a psychological extension of the characters’ inner world—particularly that of the male protagonist. Because the film plays with the boundary between dream and reality, I knew early on that the soundtrack had to shift in tone and texture throughout the narrative. My first step was to analyze the script and visual cues to identify which scenes called for stronger musical presence and which demanded more restrained, ambient soundscapes.
The opening scene, where the protagonist searches for the green ring, became my central focus. I wanted to create a sound environment that felt both haunting and fragile—mirroring the character’s internal sense of desperation and hope. I chose to use string instruments layered with synth textures to produce a melodic but dissonant atmosphere. The strings carry emotional weight, while the processed synthesizers add an otherworldly quality. In this way, the soundtrack subtly signals that the events may not be entirely real, setting the stage for the film’s eventual twist.
As the film progressed into more dialogue-heavy scenes, I had to rethink my approach. Initially, I was inclined to continue layering textures and musical elements to maintain a strong sonic identity. However, through discussions with the director, Wentao Liu, it became clear that simplicity and space were more appropriate for many scenes. He wanted the visuals and character dynamics to speak for themselves without being overshadowed by sound. This was a turning point for me—I had to shift from “how can I make this sound better?” to “how can sound serve the story better?” It was a humbling but insightful experience that reshaped my design choices.
In the middle portion of the film, my focus shifted toward creating minimalist ambient layers that could blend seamlessly into the environment. These sounds were not meant to stand out, but to subtly enhance the pacing and emotional tone of each scene. I used low-frequency drones, urban background noise, and light reverb to add a sense of atmosphere without clutter. I also made sure that transitional sounds—the shifts between locations or emotional beats—were smoothed out through subtle sonic bridges, helping the film flow more cohesively.
Another interesting challenge was matching the rhythmic pacing of sound to the film’s editing style. In the early phases, I created a few demos that felt musically complete, but they clashed with the visual rhythm of the cuts. I had to go back and rethink timing—not just in terms of tempo, but in how long a sound should hold or fade out. This led to a more refined understanding of timing as a narrative tool. I learned to respect silence as much as sound.
By the end of the process, the final sound design consisted of a carefully balanced structure: a rich, emotionally layered introduction; a restrained and immersive middle section; and a final moment that subtly revisits earlier motifs in a more subdued tone. This arc mirrors the story’s dream-to-reality progression, making the sound design feel cohesive and meaningful. While I started the project thinking about individual scenes, I finished with a clearer vision of how sound can create narrative continuity and emotional depth across a full film.
No music before flipping the mirror Buildingup comes in and it’s weird Continue to start the pathos Stop at the mirror 4:32-4:48 phone call part with PS drum beats, stop when the male lead speaks
9:30 removed when the driver pees Violin stuck, use less violin
After 10:50, the gun is thrown out, no/become simple, emotional change
Thigh touching part, the change of tone is obvious, the irony is aggravated, now too serious
Music after 10:10 is retained, the previous music is discarded
