Film trailers no longer rely on images alone to establish impact. In many cases, sound does the work first. Before a title card appears or a character speaks, rhythm and pressure already shape how the audience reacts.
The case of Deadpool & Wolverine, a campaign that went on to receive Silver and Bronze Clio Awards, provides a clear example of this. As soon as the first beat hits, the impact is registered before a single punchline lands. Rhythm leads the moment; it builds pressure and anticipation. The pacing felt inevitable. The architecture of the trailer depended heavily on editorial-ready sound design sourced through Black Sheep Music’s catalogue.
The multi-award-winning creative group MOCEAN is credited as the advertising agency spearheading the campaign. The campaign paired Madonna’s 1989 hit “Like A Prayer” with Black Sheep Music’s “Savages To Heroes” from their album The Great Frontier.
To achieve its signature sound, the trailer relied on modular music and sound design assets built specifically for high-speed studio marketing environments. These materials are engineered not for linear storytelling but for layering, compounding, revision, and extreme editorial manipulation.
Sound Design Built for Editorial Use
Trailer sound design differs sharply from long-form scoring. There is little room for gradual development. Impact must register in seconds. Musicality, rhythm, and sound design are no longer separate disciplines but overlapping systems.
For Deadpool & Wolverine, the tonal balance was particularly delicate. The trailer needed to support:
- Hyper-stylized action
- Comedic timing
- Legacy franchise expectations
- Rapid tonal shifts
This kind of campaign demands sound design that is rhythmically precise yet structurally flexible. Trailer sound design assets are often built to allow editors to loop, layer, or restructure cues without compromising rhythmic integrity. Sounds are designed not as standalone effects but as modular building blocks, capable of functioning across multiple editorial contexts. Black Sheep Music is at the forefront of this niche. Their catalogue and artists embraced this hybrid model and helped support the trailer.
Crucially, these materials circulate within closed industry catalogues used by trailer houses and editors. Within the campaign editing workflow, trailer sound design selection is blind. Editors choose sounds, working under tight deadlines based entirely on their efficacy within the campaign, regardless of attribution.
The Sound Designer behind the Trailer
Within Black Sheep Music’s roster, Jonathan Corbie has emerged as a consistent and technically rigorous contributor. Since 2022, his sound design work has been licensed through Black Sheep Music’s internal catalogue and selected by editors for use in major studio marketing campaigns, including Deadpool & Wolverine.
Corbie’s work competes within the catalogue itself, auditioned alongside hundreds of assets, chosen only when it solves an editorial problem.
Through this process, his sound design has been used in other critically acclaimed campaigns for:
- Fast X
- Daredevil- Born Again
- John Wick- Chapter 4
- Boy Kills World
- Nosferatu
- Dungeons & Dragons- Honor Among Thieves
Each placement reflects a competitive environment in which hundreds of sounds may be auditioned for a single project.
Technical Constraints at the Studio Level
The technical expectations for trailer sound design are exacting. Sounds must remain legible when layered against dialogue, score, and visual effects. They cannot collapse under heavy processing or lose impact when repositioned within an edit.
Corbie’s workflow combines original recordings with synthesized elements and post-processing aimed at clarity rather than excess. Equalization, dynamic shaping, and spatial design are used to define where each sound sits. The goal is consistency under pressure.
This approach reflects how trailer sound design has as much about spectacle as it is about reliability. Editors need material that holds together regardless of context.
Award Context and Industry Recognition
The Deadpool & Wolverine trailer campaign received Silver and Bronze Clio Awards, one of the industry’s most recognized honors in entertainment marketing.
Clio Awards are formally attributed to studios, agencies, editors, and supervising entities, not individual library contributors. However, the inclusion of catalogue-based sound design within an award-winning campaign indicates that the material met the highest professional standards under competitive selection.
In blind editorial systems, only what functions survives.
Work Beyond Trailer Sound Design
Corbie’s practice extends outside the trailer market. He composed the score for the documentary Untouchable: Laughing Out Caste, co-directed by Manjeet Sarkar and Mike Noone. The film follows Sarkar’s path as the first Indian comedian to perform at the United Nations. Corbie’s score uses harmonic structure rather than overt thematic motifs, supporting the film’s contemporary tone without dominating it.
In a different context, his 2024 composition Engine Room Structures provides a fully notated framework for the Trinidadian rhythm section, a tradition historically transmitted through oral practice. Rather than fixing the music into rigid form, the score preserves performer agency while offering a reference point for study and documentation.
A Functional Model of Contemporary Practice
Corbie operates within a model where visibility is secondary to function. Sounds are chosen blindly, timelines are compressed, and success is measured by usability rather than authorship. Within this system, Jonathan Corbie exerts influence through technical precision and adaptability.
The Deadpool & Wolverine trailer demonstrates how modern marketing spectacle is often built on invisible infrastructure, modular sound design engineered to withstand pressure, revision, and scale.