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2018 One Show - Moving Image Craft

Fighting Fire with Fire

Agency BBDO / New York + Here Be Dragons / Los Angeles

Client GE
BACK TO RESULTS

Annual ID

OS_MI180135M

About the Work

In a film series called “Unimpossible Missions,” GE engineers prove they can do the impossible by disproving a piece of conventional wisdom. In this film, they attempt to debunk the well-known idiom “You can’t fight fire with fire.” GE engineers believed they could extinguish fire with THE SOUND OF FIRE. If they sampled fire sounds and pitched them low enough, the bass might be able to displace oxygen and destabilize the flames, thus extinguishing the fire. Sound was essential to our story. Together with GE scientists, our sound designers captured the fire sounds, then layered and pitched them to displace oxygen. The trick was finding a sound combination that had drama but could also fight the flames. They then built special “vortex generator” speakers to focus the sounds onto a stuntman on fire. We filmed it in 360 VR, so viewers could hear everything as if they were there.