Birds Eye Super Crunch - Animated TVC Sound design and Mix

Working on a sound design and mix for an animated TVC is always a lot of fun but does provide some unique technical and creative challenges.
The atmospheres, movements, room sounds and sound effects all have to be created from scratch as there is generally no location audio. These also need to be given their own space in the mix so that they don’t overpower the music or voice over and need to be kept within the TV volume level guidelines (always the enemy of a good bass heavy explosion).
For this Birds Eye TVC I layered a lot of different sounds recorded by me and from the sound effects library at Risk sound to create the sound track.
The exploding potatoes were a good examples of this and were created by layering the sound of:
a lightning strike, snapping celery, crunching dry biscuits in my hands, crunching potato chips and a punching sound effect with the top end rolled off (filtered or EQed) for a bit of low end impact.
By EQing each individual sound effect, to make specific frequencies more or less prominent, and layering them on top of each other, the result is perceived single sound that works with the vision and is more sonically complex and interesting. It’s a bit like putting together a sonic jigsaw puzzle.
The internal oven sound was recoded by placing our Zoom h4 portable recorder in an oven and turning the oven on. Luckily I only needed a short audio snippet and I don’t recommend this at home in less you are after the sound of a melting Zoom h4!