Audiodraft Case Studies: Pauli Kopu, Klok
Creative Director and Co-Founder Pauli Kopu from creative video agency Klok talked with us about the challenges of the creative industry and their latest Audiodraft production Future of TV.
Klok is a blooming Finnish film and video production agency offering a wide array of creative, production, and strategic services. Besides ordinary video production they focus on basically anything related to moving image from distribution strategies to audience analytics. Due to the urge to know every aspect possible of their industry Klok’s team describes themselves simply as a creative video agency. Creative director and co-founder of Klok, Pauli Kopu’s calm and insightful comments over the phone gives me the impression that taking everything in consideration is actually possible.
As Klok focuses solely on moving image, sound and music are always supplied by an outside resource. Kopu explains they use a few trusted parties to get the most suitable audio for their productions. These partners include as well as music libraries, and some individual sound designers and composers, also Audiodraft.
Regarding Audiodraft’s strengths Kopu mentions the possibility to work with several composers at the same time. As individual sound designers have their unique styles, these different ways of approaching one and the same brief brings the process creative flexibility. This means a project as a whole opens up to better results from different creative possibilities. The quality of productions have thus also been high as Kopu has been able to compare several different stylistic approaches in one brief.
One of the most recent productions Klok has done with Audiodraft is Future of TV. According to Kopu, Klok started this production with the animation. They got the idea to dive inside television to see the pieces which it is “made” of; how electricity is created, how different electronic pieces are being put together and so on. From this idea they looked for the references to proceed with both the visual and the sound production. Eventually, with two reference tracks and videos uploaded on Klok’s Agency Studio Platform, they ended up with three very good propositions as the soundtrack, one of those to be heard on the actual end product. As we have been proud to hear in our previous case study interviews, also this time the music part was smooth and problem-free. (Great job, our sound designers!)
After discussing the Future of TV, we continued about challenges regarding great audio. In this matter Kopu takes a wider perspective, showing the more visionary side to him. He points out three things which touch the creative production as a whole. Firstly, regarding the challenges coming from the outside, the main one is the schedule of any given production. It is not really anybody’s fault but just the sum of many things which leads to schedules being usually very tight. Even a little bit of more time in planning and production would result in better overall quality not just sound-wise but in general.
Secondly, and Kopu says this with an honest drag in his voice as he seems to be a true creative enthusiast, sometimes customers start to slip away at the last minute from the (assumably awesome) creative concepts. This means attitude-wise taking the project one step back towards general consensus in between production, post-production and publishing a project. So to make sure to have the courage to stick with the decided concept, there should be a clear plan which is carefully written down and tested out. Kopu notes that sometimes creatively ambitious concepts are not what is needed and that is okay, too. But once there is a plan it should be stick with. He notes that with better briefs more complex ideas can be tested out, something Audiodraft’s logic is also supporting as it’s offering several potential soundtracks for any given brief.
Finally as the third point, Kopu stresses the importance of the team spirit. According to him, the right ingredients for any high quality work lie in the team clicking together. But it is not so much about being physically present as a group as simply keeping up a great energy: vibes stay high as long as people are quick to react, response and put out new versions of the production at hand. So for example the facelessness of the music making seems not to be a problem for Kopu as long as the answering times stay short and both the quality of making and easiness of communication high.
And aren’t we proud to hear at Audiodraft that our designers have constantly proven to be exactly like that.
