2018 PYEONGCHANG OLYMPIC WINTER GAMES

NBC OLYMPICS

We teamed up with David Barton and his creative team over at NBC Universal to design the sound for the 2018 PyeongChang Olympic Winter Games. It’s (naturally) an honor to create work that will literally reach people all over the world, and it was an exciting challenge to find the textures that communicated the specific feeling of winter from a sonic standpoint. We’ve put together a reel featuring clips from the Olympics broadcast earlier this year. Hopefully this helps to give a sense of how the sound design was integrated in to the show. Our team’s goal was to have the design flow naturally in to program, almost feeling like the environment was responsible for the sonic nature of the animations we see on screen.

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[slide-right]The 2018 PyeongChang Olympic Winter Games

Production Company: NBC Olympics

Task: Sound Design and Mix[/slide-right]

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Characterizing a feeling like "cold" in sound means considering its dimension- does it feel "heavy" or "light"? Is it a howling wind or a distant breeze? As we developed samples for the Pyeong Chang package, we perfected this aesthetic while creating the design to support the Winter Olympic-level precision of fast-moving graphics.

While the geography of the games was not included in the original creative direction, the resulting toolkits heavily incorporated environment-specific sound design including field-recorded winds and fire crackling (ironic, right?)- creating a unique, naturalistic soundscape. Our intentions always fell back on wanting to make people feel cold based on the sounds we created. And to provide NBC with something new, fresh, and unique to the games our team went out in the field and recorded a toolkit comprising of nearly 200 unique elements from hockey skates, to glass breaking, and everything in between.

The sound effects we created needed to ride a fine line - that of avoiding fatigueing the listener from hearing them over and over again, whilst still offering something sonically interesting to draw ones attnetion to the animation. The detail we incorporate to do this requires a large amount of time to perfect.