"We The Culture" is a Black creator's program and social community from Meta dedicated to celebrate Black creativity and creating Black equity.

This short film spotlights the artist "Kemba" who shapes culture through his story and his music.

We highlighted creators through the lens of the “Good Glitch”. Through the “Good Glitch”, we created a series of films that seek to explore and narrate the relationship between creators and their art. This allowed us to find answers to what drives creators, what is their motivation and ambition. This also focused on the change that they sparked within themselves, their environment, and their communities.

The Black community over-indexes on engagement on the Facebook platform, but the content coming from Facebook-owned properties historically has not reciprocated their investment on the platform.

- Despite heavy mainstream consumption of content produced by Black creators, the Black community is consistently met with negativity (overtly racist, bigoted commentary and abuse) and lack of understanding on our social channels.

- While our ability to credibly prove action in the racial justice space has historically been lacking, Facebook’s $25M investment and the launch of We The Culture (alongside additional new Black Community Programs) was an important step toward building a safer space for better representation, lending scale to topics that matter to the Black community, driving tangible action and ultimately better allyship.

While his voice constitutes the driving element, the sound design plays a crucial role in making this film emotionally resonant. It was creatively envisioned as two different parts:

-The first is composed of the sound effects/foley/ambient elements that make the slices of life feel tactile and emotionally tangible by bringing the wider worlds of this film to life.

-The second is the actual voice of the artist, which purposefully switches between being devoid of any effect, and some other moments where his voice feels elevated by the unexpected use of effects (analog tape manipulation, reverb, delay etc…) to give a more cinematic dimension to the narrative being told. This is accomplished by putting an emphasis on specific words for example.

Overall, this was an interesting project to Sound Design as his voice has its own musicality and weight. It was an exercise that revolved around finding the right balance.