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Looking for Oliver with Icelandair

We can confirm that ‘Oliver' was not found at Creative Outpost! This delightful commercial created by our friends at Pablo, alongside Sam Hibbard at Somesuch, explores the wonderful landscapes of Iceland whilst we, the viewer, hunt for the protagonist ‘Oliver’. 

It was a joy to work on the sound design for this project, with our Senior Sound Designer, Alex, being let free reign to capture the essence of Iceland, with bespoke ambiences that subtly give you an accurate taste of the sounds of the vast landscapes, through to the subtle foley of movements of the characters throughout… Oh and a helicopter flyby (alas that was crafted from our vast library of SFX… sadly Alex didn’t get a trip on a helicopter!)

There was a fun journey with the music, trying out different genres but with a focus on music from Icelandic Artists. The team decided on the track ‘Oveant’ by Icelandic Punk Band Purrkurr Pilknikk, supervised by Curation Music. We played with a live version of the track, but it didn’t allow us to craft the music quite how we wanted. Luckily we were able to get stems of the studio recording of the track to give us more flexibility. However what was lost was the original edge and energy of the live performance. 

So, Alex filtered and placed the music through amp simulations to add a bit of grit, as well as surgically selecting beats to stretch and place slightly out of time, to make it more loose and less polished as a performance. The issue also with punk music in general in a TV mix is that there is a lot of information in the mid-range frequencies (especially those pesky guitars) so it was a challenge to create room in the mix so the characters dialogue could poke through, as well as all the lovely sound design elements.

But overall everyone is delighted with how this charming spot is making waves, and making people smile! We wonder if Oliver ever did make it out of Iceland....