I’m Arjun Ram Srivatsa. I am an artist, musician, poet, animator, creative director, video director, video editor, motion designer, graphic designer, sound designer, podcaster, journalist, writer, music critic, birdwatcher, and friend living in Manhattan.
I hold a masters degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
I’ve made editorial video for publications including The New York Times, Vogue, GQ, and Vanity Fair. I’ve made commercial work for Ford, McDonalds, and Sony Music. From 2020 to 2021 I hosted Diversity Hire, a podcast about being “POC” in media.
You can email me at arjunrsri@gmail.com
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Arjun Ram Srivatsa
Y2K25, Sony Music, Commercial
Advertisement for Sony Music’s Popstruck Y2K25 campaign, celebrating the music that made the millennium.
For the first spot, I learned how to do this ASCII technique from @synthymental so go him them a follow.
Basically, you pixelate the footage to break it down into uniform squares, each with a single color and luminosity value. Then you assign shapes to each pixel. For example, the darkest squares like shadows in the “Ms. Jackson” video got static dots, while the more predominate midtones like Beyoncé’s face got a looping Y-2-K animation. It’s pretty fun to make because it’s fully procedural, so once you have it set up you can plop any footage into it.
I also used Ableton to create the music and sound effects. I isolated the vocals for each track then cooked up an easy 2000s dnb beat. It took some time to sync everything but it turned out great. Because Sony is very cautious about licensing sounds I had to figure out ways to create noises from scratch.
For a second spot, I traveled back to a time when we had to traverse the landmines of popup ads. For these ads, I used a technique to turn footage into bitmap images in order to mimic the downgraded quality of Y2K internet ads. I also downgraded the audio using Audacity. Everything was then filtered through a CRT channel splitter to mimic the look of old monitors.
I made 30 and 15 second cuts of both spots, in 9x16, 16x9, and 4x5 dimensions.
Sony
c. 2024
Director
Editior
Animator
Music Producer
Sound Designer
Creatives:
Audg Fenter
Olivia Gattuso