Nailing what a flying football player bird might sound like when it lets loose with a caw isn’t your usual Super Bowl spot brief. But that was the heart of what Alt_Mix had to do when coming up with the sound design for “Migration,” the hilarious “NFL Sunday Ticket” ad that ran right before kickoff of Super Bowl LVIII.
Created by YouTube Creative Studio and produced by MJZ, the spot shows what happens when football players take to the skies in their annual, end of season migration. YouTube Creative Studio turned to Alt_Mix (www.altmixstudio.com), the New York-based audio post studio founded by veteran mixer Cory Melious, for the second year in a row to provide complete audio mixing and sound design services for their Big Game commercial. To view this year’s spot see below or go here.
“Migration” opens with a seasoned birder raising binoculars to his eyes. “Beautiful, isn’t it,” he says softly as an orchestral score from Walker rises in the background and we hear the far-off cawing of the flying gridsters. “Each year they must follow the path of migration, but never fear, they’ll be back,” he says as we see the players swooping in to grab a fish from a lake or alighting gently just outside a cabin.
Alt_Mix handled all aspects of the spot’s final audio, including sound design from the ground up, voiceover recording and mix.
The greatest challenge was figuring out what a football playing ‘birdman’ should sound like. “There was a lot of testing and experimentation in coming up with just the right sound to their calls,” says Melious, who’s something of an amateur birder himself. “The creative team had a really good idea of what they wanted us to achieve, and it was our job to help them articulate that with sound. We did lots of variations, and in the end we mixed humans making bird sounds with actual bird calls to get just the right pitch and tone.”
The spot features a number of star players, such as D’Andre Swift, the running back for the Philadelphia Eagles; Baltimore Ravens tight end Mark Andrews; and Seattle Seahawks wide receiver Tyler Lockett. Also appearing at the end of the spot, watching “Sunday Ticket” in the cabin scene, are the popular YouTube Creators Deestroying, Pierson Wodzynski and Sean Evans.
There was an interesting interplay between the artists doing the edit, effects and finishing and the soundscape his studio created, Melious adds. “They recognized that the sound had to be strong in order to sell the idea of a football player-sized bird that migrates. For instance, they were editing the Tyler Lockett scene with no sound on him. But once they laid the soundtrack on, it became a laugh out loud moment. For the story to work, we needed to connect the details seen in the visuals to make them believable, so we worked really hard to bring those tiny movements alive with sound, like when the tree branch snapped after a player landed on it, or the dust and debris kicked up when they landed by the cabin. It’s all about elevating the viewers’ experience.”
