New York, NY (August 10, 2015)—New York-based full-service music company Pull has scored Inside Small-Sided, Nike’s new online film series on soccer games with fewer players competing on a smaller sized field
Small-sided soccer can be a lifeline to young athletes with big dreams of breaking into a professional soccer league. Nike’s series uncovers the 24/7 small-sided action in Mexico City, Santiago de Chile, Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires.
Composer Mitch Davis teamed up with producer Scott Brittingham to found Pull, which has scored hundreds of commercials, branded content features and films, for clients including Apple, Mercedes, Toyota, ESPN, Heinz, UPS and VH1. Davis, who has collaborated with U2, Danger Mouse and Bobby Womack, made the most of his SoHo studio for Inside Small-Sided, choosing a cello and a curated collection of castoff instruments to create the series’ soundtrack.
“I’m really pushing the instrument here, playing it in a way that it’s not meant to be played,” he explains. “Besides bowing the cello, I’m hitting it, plucking it, smacking it, detuning it and scraping it to get the sound I want. It’s a cello, it’s a drum, it’s a berimbau—it’s whatever instrument I need it to be.
“I also keep a number of broken instruments for projects like this, which I can stretch beyond the limits for which they were designed, and produce sounds that were never intended. I set up several mics around me, placed at varying distances and all with drastically different tonal characteristics,” Davis says.
“I’d grab whatever instrument was needed and play it sitting in the same spot, creating a sense of space from the various mic positions in the room. That tension of getting it in the first take was a part of the feel that’s just like a soccer match: something’s going to happen that’s unexpected.”
