Nick Gellatly
It’s Playtime – Quite Literally!
We’re almost half way through the semester, the clocks have changed and it is dark outside much of the time. And despite the mid-term break I had to head into Cambridge on Monday to complete part of a project for the ‘Happiness’ Ruskin Module. I didn’t mind though – because I love Monday mornings – at least since I began this course, I’ve started to rediscover the joy in work. For much of my 40 years of employment, the ‘Sunday scaries’ often began on Saturday afternoon and the thought of going to work was, frankly, horrifying.
Not so with all the fascinating stuff we get up to in Digital Media Production and Motion Graphics is no exception. For this module, I have revisited a much loved film with a mix of affection, melancholy and gentle anxiety. I was not sure that I’d be able to bring this project together such is my nervousness at the word ‘Adobe’. In a future blog entry, I may well reflect on the after effects of After Effects but for now, it is time to review the process which brough me to this point.
The heading for this post demonstrates where I am going with this and so I will start where it end. Here is my reimagined title sequence for ‘My Beautiful Laundrette. In researching this project, I visited the laundrette in Cambridge’s Mill Road and last weekend attracted puzzled looks as I photographed on in London’s Bloomsbury.
Most of these establishments may not be described as classically beautiful but I hope that my version of the film titles shows some of the beauty of the story, the characters and the journey to creating this piece:
The sound of drums
At the end of Week 5 the titles worked and made no sound at all. Ninety seconds of coins, foam, condensation and neon, playing in total silence. This week I fixed that, and every single sound in it was generated rather than recorded. Working on the audio play for the Immersive Storytelling module had led me to realise what ElevenLabs was capable of doing and searching out sound effects for the previous iteration of this project – as well as for that one – showed me that repurposing sounds wasn’t completely satisfactory.
My original plan was to take a recorder into a launderette. I realised that digital media could achieve a better result and so that’s what I decided to use and I think the result speaks for itself. The sound effects in my video fit the visuals perfectly – in my opinion at least.
So here is the honest trade-off, stated up front because it matters.
What I lost: the specific. A real launderette has a particular room, particular machines, a particular drip. Field recording gives you accidents you would never think to ask for, and accidents are most of what makes a soundtrack feel true.
What I gained: exactly what the cue sheet asked for, in an afternoon, for about seventy pence. No permissions, no handheld noise, no builder outside, no one asking what I was doing.
Writing prompts for sound
The model was ElevenLabs eleven_text_to_sound_v2. Four habits made the difference between something usable and something I threw away.
Name the object, not the feeling. “Ominous atmosphere” gets nothing. “Deep continuous electrical hum of an industrial washing machine” gets you washing machine.
Say where the microphone is. “Close microphone”, “heard from close up”, “almost silent surroundings”. Perspective is half of what makes a sound sit in a space.
Say what you do not want. Almost every prompt below ends with no music, no voices. Without it the model adds a soundtrack, and you cannot remove it afterwards. The busy launderette says no clear words instead, because a murmur was wanted and dialogue was not.
Describe the shape over time. A sound with a beginning and an end needs that spelled out: “accelerating steadily from a low rumble up to a high fast whine”, “ending with one solid mechanical clunk”. This is the one I got wrong, and section four is about that.
Here is every prompt, verbatim, with the settings each was finally generated at.
| # | Cue | Prompt | Sec | Infl | Loop |
| 01 | roomtone | Seamless looping room tone of an empty launderette late at night, large tiled room, faint fluorescent tube buzz, a very distant slow water drip, hollow and still, no music, no voices, no machines running | 22 | 0.35 | yes |
| 02 | coin in hand | A single pound coin being turned over and over between finger and thumb, tiny delicate metallic scrapes and taps, extremely close microphone, almost silent surroundings, no music, no voices | 2 | 0.30 | no |
| 03 | coin drop | A single heavy pound coin dropped into a metal coin slot, it slides down a metal chute and lands with a bright clink, close microphone, dry and crisp, no music, no voices | 2 | 0.30 | no |
| 04 | drawer | A heavy metal coin drawer on a launderette machine being pushed firmly in, metal sliding on metal, ending in a solid clunk, followed one second later by a relay click and a machine powering up, no music, no voices | 2 | 0.30 | no |
| 05 | machine hum | Seamless looping deep continuous electrical hum of an industrial washing machine, low mains drone with a faint steady motor whirr underneath, constant and unchanging, no music, no voices, no footsteps | 22 | 0.35 | yes |
| 06 | water fill | A solenoid valve opening and water rushing into an empty metal washing machine drum, hissing jet of water hitting hollow metal, building up, close and enclosed, no music, no voices | 4 | 0.35 | no |
| 07 | drum tumbling | Seamless looping sound of heavy wet laundry tumbling slowly inside a rotating washing machine drum, soft rhythmic thumps of soaked fabric, water sloshing, the whole machine body resonating, heard from close up, no music, no voices | 25 | 0.35 | yes |
| 08 | wet street | Seamless looping ambience of a rain soaked British terraced street at night, steady light rain on wet pavement, water running in a gutter, a single car passing in the far distance on a wet road, no music, no voices, no thunder | 22 | 0.35 | yes |
| 09 | foam | Thick soap suds and foam fizzing and crackling, thousands of tiny bubbles popping, soft high frequency hiss building then settling, very close microphone, no music, no voices | 4 | 0.35 | no |
| 10 | the drip | A single slow water droplet falling and landing in a small puddle inside a quiet enclosed tiled space, with a long natural reverb tail, almost total silence around it, no music, no voices | 3 | 0.35 | no |
| 11 | wipe glass | A hand holding a damp cloth wiping firmly across a steamed up pane of glass, two broad squeaking strokes, rubber and wet fabric on glass, close microphone, no music, no voices | 2 | 0.30 | no |
| 12 | neon on | A large neon shop sign switching on, two sharp electrical cracks and flickers in quick succession, then settling into a steady continuous glass tube buzz, no music, no voices | 2 | 0.30 | no |
| 13 | spin up | An industrial washing machine entering its spin cycle, the motor accelerating steadily from a low rumble up to a high fast whine over several seconds, the drum balancing, water draining, powerful and mechanical, no music, no voices | 6 | 0.35 | no |
| 14 | wind down | A washing machine reaching the end of its cycle, the spinning motor winding down from a high whine to silence over several seconds, ending with one solid mechanical clunk as the drum locks, then quiet, no music, no voices | 5 | 0.35 | no |
| 15 | door opens | The heavy chrome door of an industrial washing machine being unlatched and swung fully open, a sharp metallic latch click followed by a smooth hinge swing and a soft rubber seal release, close microphone, no music, no voices | 2.5 | 0.35 | no |
| 16 | busy shop | Seamless looping interior ambience of a busy working launderette, several washing machines and tumble dryers running at once, a warm mechanical hum, the faint distant murmur of unintelligible conversation, a tiled reverberant room, no music, no clear words | 22 | 0.35 | yes |
‘Infl’ is prompt influence, from 0 to 1. The default is 0.3. I raised it to 0.35 on everything I regenerated, which tightened the result against the description without making it sound mechanical.
Loop is the one setting I would tell anyone to find first. With it on, the model makes a clip whose end joins its start cleanly, so a twenty-two second bed covers seventy-seven seconds of film without a seam. Without it you have to do this by hand.
The score, in one prompt
The music was eleven_music_v2_5, ninety-six seconds, instrumental, two takes. Here is the prompt in full.
“Instrumental electronic title cue at 96 BPM built on a mechanical washing-machine pulse: filtered analogue synth bass, dry tabla and dholak hits locked to a tight drum machine, warm 1980s pads underneath. Opens sparse and curious with single plucked notes over the machine rhythm, thickens gradually as arpeggios and a simple minor-key hook arrive, then lands a full-energy drop at 45 seconds with driving bass, bright synth lead and layered percussion. Holds that energy to a confident finish. Warm analogue production with light tape saturation”.
96 BPM, stated in the prompt. The whole sequence was already cut to a 96 BPM grid.
The machine as the rhythm section. “Built on a mechanical washing-machine pulse” keeps time with the visuals.
Tabla and dholak against a drum machine. The original 1985 score for the film by Ludus Tonalis wove South Asian instrumentation through synthesisers. Reimagining for 2026 meant keeping that conversation and updating both halves of it, rather than quoting the original or ignoring it.
Testing a script for software you do not have
After Effects is not on the machine where this script was written. Two weeks ago that cost me a day: a script failed silently on an undeclared variable and I spent three rounds redesigning something that was never broken.
So there is now a fake After Effects, about two hundred lines of JavaScript that pretends to be the parts of the API these scripts touch. It holds a mock composition, mock footage items with the real measured durations of all sixteen files, and an audio levels property that records its keyframes so they can be inspected.
Running the placement script against it takes under a second and checks things the eye would not:
- no layer is zero length or runs past the end of the composition
- no looped bed has a gap between copies
- level keyframes are in ascending time order
- running the script twice produces the same result as running it once
- a missing file is skipped with a useful message rather than throwing
It found two real bugs before the script ever reached After Effects, including the marker collision above. That is a good return on an afternoon, and the harness gets reused every week now.
Why 96 BPM?
I picked 96 beats per minute a couple of weeks ago, for the pictures, before there was any thought of sound. It turned out to be the single most useful choice I made, and it was close to luck.
At 24 frames per second:
| Seconds | Frames | |
| 1 beat | 0.625 | 15 |
| 1 bar | 2.5 | 60 |
| 36 bars | 90 | 2160 |
I am not a musician but I now realise that the beat is determined by the number of frames, nothing ever lands between two frames. A cue is either on a beat or it is not, and the table makes the second one hard to type.
For example, the neon sign cracks on at 55.625 seconds, which is five beats into frame eight, which is frame 1335 of 2160. It was at 55.52 in an earlier version, which is four and a bit beats, and it felt slightly wrong.
What it cost, and what I would tell myself
The finished version with sound is above . The silent version from two weeks ago is here:
This post is about the gap between them.
| Cost | |
| Sixteen effects, first pass | 17p |
| Six regenerated at proper length | 3p |
| Score, two takes at 96 seconds | 52p |
| Total | about 72p |
Seventy-two pence and about three hours, most of which was writing the placement script rather than making sound.
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