“Quiet The Noise” is the ultimate metaphor for listening to your music with the AirPods Pro. The film opens with a mysterious chunk of earth floating in the sky as a construction worker drills with a jackhammer. To our surprise, we don’t hear a thing. The city’s noise is drowned out by the ethereal sound of Tkay Maidza’s Pixies cover of “Where is my Mind”—the film’s soundtrack. Continuing in the sky, a wave of recognizably noisy objects, from a traffic jam to an entire parade, float silently in the clouds. On the ground, we find a young woman with AirPods Pro listening to the track in complete peace as the world hovers above. Pinching the stem to toggle into Adaptive Transparency, the hustle and bustle of the city come crashing back down until she pinches to reactivate Active Noise Cancellation, once again sending the noise back into the sky.

The all-new AirPods Pros have some of the best Active Noise Cancellation technology inside any headphone on the market. First, however, consumers needed to be aware of how powerful the technology was compared to the previous generation.

The brief to ourselves was simple: bring the listening experience on AirPods Pro to life in a captivating product demo. Rather than relying on facts and statics to tell the story, we wanted to reinvent how product demos work in marketing and advertising. This led us to bring an element of humanity and magic into the demo, creating a film that is every part relatable, fantastical, and a clear demonstration of the power of Active Noise Cancellation on the all-new AirPods Pro.

Lifting a whole city street with people and vehicles up into the air wasn't going to be physically possible no matter how many cranes we had. So we had to lean heavily on creating a CGI fleet of vehicles and people to add into roads in the sky. Hundreds of CG objects were placed using a custom VFX tool we developed allowing us to place, raise, lower, rotate and bounce the vehicles and people in shot.

Where the vehicles are in the air like a web, crash back to earth and raise into the sky at the end, had to be entirely CG as it was impossible to achieve in camera.

For the hero action we managed to film there was a huge amount of wire removal and roto needed to allow us to composite in the drone footage of the city below the people and cars.

All around the world, people are back to commuting, traveling, and working in an office. Unfortunately, this means they are once again surrounded by noise that may interfere with their listening experience daily.