This article is a part of a series that dissects projects that One Thousand Birds (OTB, the sound design studio behind Hii) has been a part of. We’re here to provide perspective from OTB’s producers and engineers on some of our favorite projects we’ve worked on. In this second installment, Hii sat down with producer Alex (ABC) and engineer Hayley to discuss Shiseido’s skincare brand BAUM’s launch video project.

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Ok, so we got emailed with a project inquiry and were awarded this job, how do we get there from a producer standpoint?

Alex Berner Coe, Producer @ OTBNY:

"This is an interesting one from a producer perspective because this project was brought our way in February 2020, and we delivered during the first week of pandemic lockdown. I think we had planned to do the final mixing in person, and we didn’t have any livestream capabilities figured out yet at that point, so a lot of the final tweaking that would usually happen in a mix session was happening via phone and email.

I remember there was one specific stem in the music edit that the director was going back and forth on, an issue that probably could have been resolved in 20 minutes during a session, but it ended up being resolved with about 20 phone calls instead. We got the project over the finish line on March 18 2020 – I think the producer I was working with (Jake) and I are bonded for life now!"

There were no human voices for this project, Hayley, what was it like to open up this prep and dig in?

Hayley Livingston, Audio Engineer @ OTBNY:

"This was quite a relaxing project to work on considering the main element was nature sounds / wildlife. Looking through our sound libraries for the right waterfall/creek/bird sound could have put me into a peaceful slumber if I wasn’t properly caffeinated.

The trickiest part was probably marrying the elements of the extreme wide shots versus the extreme closeups. Skincare as a concept is focused on the tiny details, so it was important to make those tiny details feel as big as the forests they were also showing.

This spot is also driven heavily by music, so it was crucial to make sure sonic details could peek out when they needed to, while still putting the music in the forefront and letting it be the centerpiece element. I began by fully designing every possible sound I could, and then we stripped back those elements in the final mix so that only the most important sound design was audible / as to not make it too crowded."

And then we handed it off to the client and the project was released.

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For more behind-the-scenes chat, revisit our first Inside OTB here, where we covered Squarespace's Superbowl commercial with Winona Ryder.