This job, part of BMW’s sponsorship of the RFU, involved getting out of the studio and recording live stadium crowds. The agency wanted to create real drama and excitement in the audio against a slowly evolving visual setting, preempting the reveal of the rugby stadium at the end.

The challenge here was to collect recordings of a Rugby crowd singing ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”, get the complete chorus and comp them together to create a huge, inspiring sound.

The problems we faced were that stadium's are large, so crowds start singing at different times. Recording the stadium as a whole wouldn't give the clarity we needed for the sound to translate onto our visuals in the right way. The solution to this was to place directional mics in different parts of the stadium, trained across the pitch on specific sections of the stands. We could then combine the takes from each mic into a comp'd whole.

Our sound team attended two different games (England v Samoa, and the significantly noisier, 82,076 strong crowd at England v Australia) to make sure we got the perfect recordings, then worked in post to build a sonic result which had the gravitas, weight and clarity we needed to tell the story.

The result was a beautiful and memorable spot which evokes through sound the excitement and tension of the rugby.

Contributors
Agency - FCB Inferno