Inside the Making of Neural DSP’s Animated Worlds
How THIS IS RED and director Jeff O’Brien Myers turn music technology into characters, cosmic landscapes and animated worlds.
Neural DSP makes technology for musicians who care deeply about sound. So when THIS IS RED began creating animated films for the Helsinki-based music technology company, simply showing the product was never going to be enough.
The opportunity was bigger: build worlds around the technology. Across a growing series of films and campaigns, THIS IS RED has helped Neural DSP turn software, hardware and new product launches into stories, combining character animation, 2D and 3D animation, motion design, visual effects, sound and filmmaking into work designed to feel as distinctive as the products themselves.
Directed by Jeff O’Brien Myers, the films share an approach more than a single visual style. Each starts with the personality of the product, the audience and the music, then builds a world around it.
AMP ARMORY: ENTER THE NEURAL-VERSE
One of the earliest animated collaborations, Amp Armory, took Neural DSP’s universe of guitar tones and imagined it as a place you could physically enter. Inspired by the brand’s metal, prog and guitar-obsessed audience, the film drops a player into a stylized, Matrix-like armory filled with seemingly endless tonal possibilities.
THIS IS RED developed the story, storyboards, character design, animation, compositing and sound design, establishing a model that would carry through the work to come: don’t explain the technology when you can build a story around what it feels like to use it.
CORTEX CONTROL: ONE CLICK, ANOTHER WORLD
For the launch of Cortex Control, Neural DSP’s desktop controller for Quad Cortex, the challenge was to introduce software to an audience already passionate about the hardware.
The answer was a character-driven animated film. A musician at his laptop discovers that a click can transport him through a series of wildly different musical worlds. The interface becomes less a piece of software than a portal.
The campaign combined story development, character design, animation, compositing, sound design and a Dolby Atmos mix. Guitarist Rabea Massaad created an original track for the film, allowing the animation and music to move as one.
It also reinforced something that has become central to the collaboration between Neural DSP and THIS IS RED: music technology doesn’t have to be marketed like technology.
MANTRA: A NEW WORLD FOR THE HUMAN VOICE
When Neural DSP moved beyond guitar processing with Mantra, its all-in-one vocal production plugin, the visual language needed to move somewhere new too.
THIS IS RED created a surreal animated world built around the voice—developing the story, characters, environments, animation, compositing, sound design and Dolby Atmos mix. Rather than demonstrating a list of processing tools, the film transforms the possibilities of the plugin into a visual journey.
For a Pittsburgh animation studio that also works across film, music and immersive production, Mantra was a natural kind of project: sound became story, story became imagery, and imagery became a world.
NEURAL CAPTURE 2: INTO THE COSMOS
Neural Capture 2 pushed things in another direction entirely.
The new technology captures the behavior and character of amplifiers, pedals and other music gear with dramatically expanded possibilities. THIS IS RED translated that leap forward into a cosmic animated film filled with unstable energy, distant circuitry and equipment that feels less photographed than summoned. The project brought together visual development, storyboards, world building, 3D animation, compositing and sound design, with an original score by John Connearn. The result deliberately avoids the language of the traditional software demo. Neural Capture 2 becomes an event, a strange new object arriving from somewhere beyond the known universe of guitar tone.
THEN WE MADE IT BREAK OUT OF A BUILDING
The Neural DSP worlds haven’t stayed confined to conventional screens.
For Tokyo, THIS IS RED created a 3D anamorphic billboard experience designed to make Neural DSP’s imagery appear to push beyond the physical boundaries of the display. It took the same world-building philosophy behind the films and translated it to a massive public canvas, where perspective, scale and motion had to work together from a specific viewpoint on the street.
The format changed. The basic idea didn’t: make people stop and look.
ANIMATION MADE BY PEOPLE WHO UNDERSTAND MUSIC
There is a reason these projects keep moving between character animation, 3D environments, visual effects, live-action thinking, sound design and immersive audio. THIS IS RED is an animation studio and film production company built around the belief that the medium should follow the idea. The studio’s relationship with music runs just as deep, from musicians working inside the company to recording and immersive audio production inside its 20,000-square-foot Pittsburgh studio.
For director Jeff O’Brien Myers, that overlap matters. The Neural DSP films are approached as pieces of filmmaking, with rhythm, pacing, performance, cinematography and sound shaping the animation from the beginning. That helps explain why the work doesn’t share a single house style. Amp Armory can live inside a dark animated fantasy. Cortex Control can jump between musical dimensions. Mantra can become surreal and human. Neural Capture 2 can explode into deep space. A Tokyo billboard can make that universe appear to escape the screen entirely.
Different products. Different worlds. Same objective. Make the technology feel like something. And make something worth looking at.