Motion Plus Design – is the world’s largest motion design festival, bringing together leading artists, studios, and technologists from across animation, VFX, design, and digital storytelling. Each year, the festival opens with a commissioned title film that sets the creative tone for the event. For the 2025 edition in Paris, the opening titles took the form of Memories, a short film directed by Mehdi Hadi. Created as part of Motion Plus Design’s Made With programme, in partnership with Adobe and Maxon, the film launched Adobe’s new Video Partner Program and opened the festival.

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The film – explores a post-apocalyptic world shaped by technology and mechanical lifeforms, asking what remains of the human experience in the aftermath of its disappearance. Set among the ruins of a war between humans and machines, Memories follows JAIMI21, a solitary explorer robot roaming the remains of a collapsed civilisation. His mission is simple yet haunting: to recover fragments of memory stored on disks and obsolete media, preserving traces of the humanity machines once served.​ We were invited by Mehdi to collaborate on the project, supporting his film with original music and a complete sound design suite, developed in close dialogue throughout the creative process.

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Our role – was to support and amplify the narrative of Memories from an audio perspective, composing an original score and designing the full sonic language of the film. Working closely with Mehdi, we shaped sound and music to follow the robot’s journey while reinforcing the emotional weight of the world he inhabits. Rather than treating the film as a conventional linear narrative, the audio was designed to help establish the sense of a world already in motion, one that existed long before the viewer arrived. Sound played a key role in shaping this experience, articulating memory not as simple data storage, but as something emotional, fragile, and incomplete.​ As JAIMI21 uncovers recovered disks, fragments of human life resurface, a child’s laughter, words of love, distant voices shouted in chaos. These moments give meaning to his wandering, while an unseen antagonist stalks him through the ruins. The audio was used to balance intimacy and tension, gradually building toward the final confrontation, where collected human memories are projected back onto the antagonist itself.

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Sound design – was approached as a way to give the robot a distinct sonic identity, grounded, tactile, and expressive. We recorded a wide range of gadgets, mechanical devices, buttons, switches, and electronic artefacts, building a detailed palette of UI sounds and foley that defined JAIMI21’s physical presence and behaviour. Rather than leaning into overt sci-fi conventions, we adopted a cinematic, hyper-real approach, keeping sounds rooted in real-world textures and interactions. Subtle mechanical rhythms, flickers, and movements helped establish character and intent, allowing the robot to feel observant and emotionally receptive rather than purely functional.

As the film progresses and mechanical predators begin to emerge from the darkness of collapsed cities, sound design was used sparingly to suggest threat and surveillance. Restraint was key, allowing tension to accumulate quietly, so that moments of conflict and impact could land with clarity and weight.

Musically – the score was conceived as an emotional throughline, following the robot’s internal journey while carrying the narrative forward. From the outset, we wanted the music to feel deeply human, contrasting the inhuman setting with something ancient, vulnerable, and expressive. Early in the process, we explored the idea of a vocal element that felt archaic in character, ethnic or ritualistic in tone, yet intentionally difficult to place culturally or geographically. We aimed to evoke a shared sense of human origin rather than a specific tradition. This led us to collaborate with the fantastic Georgian vocalist Luka Tsiklauri, whose voice brought a raw, timeless quality to the score. Together, we developed a pure tonal vocal line, stripped of lyrical meaning and shaped only by subtle syllabic inflections. The performance was then carefully processed and treated, allowing the voice to feel like a faint memory at first, distant, fragmented, and unresolved, gradually becoming clearer and more vivid as the film progressed. This evolution mirrored the robot’s growing emotional awareness as human memories accumulated. Instrumentation and harmony were kept restrained, supporting the vocal line and emotional arc without overwhelming the sound design. Music and sound were designed to coexist fluidly, allowing moments of silence, texture, and melody to breathe within the film’s pace. 

Throughout the project, we worked in close creative dialogue with Mehdi, responding to his evolving vision and shaping the sound design and score alongside the edit. This collaborative process ensured that audio remained tightly integrated with the film’s visual language, pacing, and emotional structure.

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The final result – is a cohesive sonic experience that grounds Memories in sound that feels human, tactile, and emotionally resonant. Through a balance of detailed sound design and an expressive, voice-led score, the audio helps transform the film from a speculative vignette into a lived-in world, one where memory, loss, and emotion persist long after humanity itself has disappeared.

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-Thanks for reading!

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