The Belief In Yourself – Daniel Baekkegard
Sound design, music and voice over for “The Belief In Yourself”
An athlete portrait of professional triathlete Daniel Baekkegard, directed and shot by Markus Meller.
A small but intense project, made by a team of collaborators who were in it for the love of it. Markus asked me to create the sound design for a video that basically had no audio at all yet – thanks to Flo from Flykmont for the recommendation! Markus had a very clear vision for the sound, and over a couple of iterations we arrived at this snug, intense audio experience. I also got to write the voice over, and my friend Ian Wood stepped in to record it.
I’m really happy with how it all turned out. The creation process was a lot of fun. Archive material of our car door slamming, bike recordings I made a while back, freshly recorded chain sounds, a helmet buckle – every bit got its own treatment.
CREDITS
Director & DOP: Markus Meller ( 
/ markusmeller_ )
Drone: Florian & Michael Basche ( / flykmont_drone )
Photographer: Andreas Fuchs ( / andreasfuchs_commercialwork )
Athlete: Daniel Baekkegard ( / @danielbaekkegard )
Editor: Lukas Pittgens ( / @pittiseinzeug ) / Markus Meller
Music / Sound Design / Voiceover: Bodo Lubig ( / direblackaudio )
Color: Michael Basche ( / elbascho )
Voice: Ian Wood ( / ianwood1578 )
Spitfire Albion Colossos Rescoring
This was the Spitfire Audio Colossus Re-Scoring Competition: composers took an action trailer clip (made with film studio Factory Fifteen) and re-scored it from scratch, submitting via YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok with #ColossusRescore. The clip came with no sound at all — I built the entire audio from silence: sound design, music, and vocals.
Liminal Game Jam 2026 – Post Corporate
You are alone in an empty office. Everything was interrupted mid-routine — coffee still warm, phones still blinking, lights still humming. A computer in the center of the room is running something. You press the button. The system starts. You’re not sure what you’ve started, or how to stop it — or if you should.
A game jam is a time-constrained event, where people of different skills form a team to create a game, usually with specific topic to it. This game jam had liminality as the main focus and we created something from scratch in Unity, using FMOD for the audio implementation. It was a fun experience and I worked with a team from the US. Since I live in germany, we often talked late at night or asynchronously.
Vampire Horror 3d Game Jam #3 – Sunscorned
On the Isle of Lumina, where vampires reign, one uses the famed Violet Sepulcher to bring about eternal night and the curse of Nightbane, effectively ending the thousand-year peace between humans and vampires . After half-vampire Mattias loses his mother to the curse, he must traverse the perilous dungeons of a vampiric castle to destroy the relic and restore the sun to its rightful place.
A month-long jam leading up to Halloween, which came to about 300 hours of work. In that time I learned a lot about the capabilites of FMOD, for example how to structure events, make use of parameters and build a complex footstep system. I wrote dynamic music for the different states the player is in: exploration, combat, aftermath, pre-boss battle, boss battle and transitions and it all glues together very nicely using FMODs timeline with a parameter sheet that is triggered by logic coming from the Unreal engine. That very logic had to be build as well and so I went from the composer and sounddesigner to the technichal sounddesinger who builds the FMOD side to a programmer, building blueprints that interact with FMOD.
One problem we faced was hosting the project repository for a team of ten. First, Unreal uses binary assets that bloat the repository quite fast and secondly the same binaries cause a lot more traffic on the hosting. I decided to host the game on my personal NAS and created a Forgejo git server, with accounts for everyone and also ended up being the team’s IT persony. This cost some time early on, but it paid off with smooth collaboration for the rest of the jam.
Hear the music
Our team was:
DJ Grimsley
Programming, Game Design, Combat, Architecture, Game systems, Custom plugins, Cutscenes
Sai Bellaire
Animation curation, Concept Art, Environment Art, Game Design, Level Design, Lighting, Material Creation, Programming, Prop modeling, Project Manager, Rigging, VFX creation and curation
Bodo Lubig (Dire Black Audio)
Audio Director, Sound Design, Music, Audio Implementation & Technical Sound Design, Programming, Version Control / Infrastructure
William Overbey
3D Character Art, Level Design, Game Design
Esther Gan
Environment Art, Level Design, Lighting, Prop Modeling
Tessa Breland
Environment art, Game design, Prop art, Foliage Creation, Landscape Material Creation
Ariana Tranumn
Writing, Game Design, Narrative Design, Combat Design and Programming
Releases
As Dire Black Audio I also release music. It usually plays either in the cinematic or the experimental realm.
Book Your Spot
Contact
project@direblackaudio.com
Reach out to me
Open: 10:00 am – 05:00 pm
Weekend: 10:00 am – 02:00 am