Otherworldly images and fantasy-laden concepts dominate SHOOT’s top three music and sound design tracks. In Sony PlayStation’s "PlayStation 9," a video game system becomes the ultimate virtual reality game, with spores entering a player’s nose to heighten the experience. A track worthy of the latest futuristic Hollywood blockbuster backs the spot.
Rather than signify the appearance of a ghost town, tumbleweeds act as a family, watching TV, in "Desert," which promotes the Sony Wega digital TV set. As more tumbleweeds gather around the set, the music, which had been somewhat ominous, becomes more happy.
Rounding out the top three spot tracks is Qwest Communications’ "Holiday," which features a young boy wishing for a white Christmas —a difficult feat, given that he lives in what appears to be a barren dustbowl. But through the power of concentration, the boy is able to conjure up some frosty weather. The impressive score is supplemented with eerie sound design.
Below SHOOT looks at how the top three tracks were created.
Number ONE
We are looking at the world of the future—an image of a city street that could come out of Blade Runner or The Fifth Element: mile-high skyscrapers, flying subways, and outdoor elevators serving as the backdrop for a young man dressed in futuristic clothing. A seductive voiceover intones: "New for 2078"—the teenager holds a glass globe in his hand with the symbol PS9 written on its side—"Playstation 9’s electronic spores that tap straight into your adrenal gland." The globe splits open and something enters the boy’s nose.
Then, as the voiceover explains the fun you can have with PlayStation 9, we are treated to a series of fast-moving images that morph quickly from one to another (two knights battle around the teen; he swims underwater and encounters a mermaid who turns into an octopus, and so on) until he returns to the world he started in. The voiceover explains, "The ultimate just got better. PlayStation 9. Teleport yours today." The image fades, and the last words on screen are "… the beginning," followed by graphics for Playstation 2, the next-generation video game system from Sony."
"Playstation 9," the commercial within a commercial, was dreamed up by creatives at TBWA/Chiat/ Day, San Francisco, and directed by Erick Ifergan of Serial Dreamer, West Hollywood. For the music, which ranges from orchestral snippets and choral voices to a driving techno beat, the agency turned to composer/sound designer Ren Klyce at Mit Out Sound/M.O.S., Sausalito, Calif. Klyce had worked before, on Nike and Levi’s, with Chuck McBride, creative director for TBWA North America, and executive creative director on the spot.
Klyce recalls that he was included during the storyboard stage of "PlayStation 9," and actually began composing to animatics and then rough footage. "The spot went through quite a few different conceptual versions, one of which was quite abstract," notes Klyce. "I don’t remember how many versions there were. At one point, I was instructed to head in a technological direction—the agency wanted constant pulse, a tribal texture, mixed with techno rhythms. That yielded mixed results."
Kylce reports that creatives at the agency gave him free rein to explore new directions, but adds that there was a great deal of discussion about which way to go. "We were wrestling with a lot ideas," explains Scott Wild, associate creative director/copywriter on the spot. "At first, we thought it would be more sound than music. Then, we thought we’d have different music for each scene. We wanted it to be eclectic. But that ended up going in a bit too many directions. There were so many elements changing that you couldn’t [follow it]. We decided to use the music as glue to hold the whole journey together."
Still, even that led to discussions. Klyce says McBride wanted "world music," primarily in the Australian aborigine style, while Wild argued for a classical feel. "Scott was wonderfully obsessed with there being this triumphant long note at the end of the piece," recalls Klyce. "He kept singing it to me over the phone."
That note dictated the direction of the score, which ultimately took about a month to complete. "If it were going to end like that, it had to have some color of that instrumentation in the beginning," Klyce explains. "So I used that [as the framework] and ended up blending a lot of the tracks from the previous versions—the techno tracks, the synthesizer, and then the orchestral direction." Klyce also used a portion of Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman.
Klyce acted as the spot’s sound designer, too, which simplified matters somewhat. "Usually you have a wrestling match between sound and music," notes Wild. "But Ren did both, so we didn’t."
Wild and Klyce are both very pleased with the result. "It was extremely challenging, but it ended up being a wonderful blending of classical meets techno," Klyce states. "You had a bunch of styles which would not normally fit together, but we managed it. There were a lot of lucky collisions."
Number Two
Sony Wega’s "Desert" has a dreamy, fantastic quality to it. A tumbleweed rolls across a metallic-looking, almost black-and-white desert landscape. The soundtrack—simple notes played on what sounds like a xylophone—is eerie, wistful and almost otherworldly. The weed stops rolling as it comes up to a large television set. On it, is a colorful image of a boy jumping into a cool, blue swimming pool.
The camera begins pulling back from the set, and the music becomes more upbeat and complex, with a New Age bass-driven beat kicking in. Other tumbleweeds are now rolling towards the TV set, all of them stopping and surrounding the box, almost like a group of people flocking to an electronics store window. They appear to be "watching" the television. The word "Escape" appears on the TV’s screen, followed by the Sony Wega logo.
The ad was directed by Gerard de Thame of bicoastal HSI Productions and Gerard de Thame Films, London, via Young & Rubicam (Y&R) New York, and scored by Amber Music, London. (Amber also has an office in New York.) The musical concept was apparently simple: "I wanted something that was very distinctive, that incorporated a variety of ambient, interesting sounds," explains Josh Rabinowitz, associate partner/music producer at Y&R. "I wanted something that would move you and work with what’s going on in the picture."
Rabinowitz had worked with Amber before, on spots such as Ericsson’s "Notes," directed by Alain Gourier via Digital Domain, Venice, Calif. (He has since joined Bruce Dowad Associates, Los Angeles.) Amber had also done tracks for the agency on previous ads for Sony, as well as for Dr Pepper. Rabinowitz liked the house’s approach. "I feel very comfortable with them because they are not reticent about making changes," he says. "The comfort zone is very important when you are dealing with revision after revision. Most clients are demanding, and Amber will cater to their needs."
Rabinowitz gave Amber the spot brief, and then Nick Amour and Andrew Carroll, the composers/ sound designers on "Desert," saw the spot. "The film speaks to you," Amour states. "It had quite a hollow feel. We didn’t want to make it scary, so we had to traverse the line between being arty and being commercial. We tried a lot of musical ideas. It was a process of elimination [to find the right track]."
He notes that the pair was inspired by a track it had heard from the original Dirty Harry that was composed by noted film composer Lalo Schifrin. "The notion of rolling bass getting more and more intense came from that," recounts Amour. "In Dirty Harry, there’s this soft, grungy bass, and it builds up before you know it’s there. I liked what that did." For "Desert," Carroll played the bass; the rest of the soundtrack was created electronically by using samples.
After a few days, Rabinowitz visited the composers. "I came by the music house at 3:30 and they presented me with what they had done," he recalls. "I thought it was a good start. We had to show stuff to the client at 5 o’clock. We collaborated, and the next hour-and-a-half felt like ten minutes. It came together quickly in a real give-and-take. We presented it to the client and they were floored."
After the first screening, there were some minor revisions—a percussion bass line was moved, for instance—but, Rabinowitz says, "overall, we got the concept and vibe in that ninety-minute session."
Adds Amour: "Josh is a great music producer, because he was very enthusiastic. He said, ‘Fantastic,’ and then said, ‘Maybe we can make it better.’ He was a great help." The complete job took about two weeks.
Carroll notes that the music needed to "infuse a childlike quality at the front that was strange and yet not threatening. The music needed to set the tone. With the second part, as the camera panned away, we got tougher with [the track]. We gave it that gritty, earthy quality. I was very pleased with [the spot] because the music went somewhere. It told a story."
"Getting what you feel across in a spot can be difficult," says Rabinowitz. "So many people are involved, and they crush what the original concept is. In this case, however, we got it. I don’t want to exaggerate, but doing this was magical."
Number Three
The scene is an isolated house on a steaming hot desert. A dog is sleeping on the porch, with a fly noisily buzzing around his head. A young boy runs out, dressed only in pajamas and a pair of shoes. As he wipes sleep from his eyes, he looks around, disappointed. Then he glances up into the blazing hot sun, sighs, stares down at his feet. Suddenly, he looks at the sky again.
He closes his eyes, clenches his hands into fists and begins whispering, as if in prayer. Slowly, the wind begins whipping around, clouds form, and the sky darkens, accompanied by eerie sounds and murmuring horror movie-style voices. A storm hits and, miraculously, snow begins falling. Heavenly music is heard, and the boy smiles. It will be a white Christmas. "The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams," states the voiceover.
This short sequence may seem like a teaser for The Twilight Zone, but is actually a :60 directed by Kinka Usher, of House of Usher Films, Santa Monica, for Qwest Communications, and uses the tagline: "Imagine. It’s possible. Qwest." The ad, through J. Walter Thompson, New York, blends sound, music, and evocative images to create an indelible mood—from the ominous to the hopeful, all in a minute. (There is also a 97-second theatrical version.)
To score the piece, the agency turned to Hayley Moss, a composer at Yessian Music, which has offices in Farmington Hills, Mich., and New York; Moss works out of the New York office. She was one of a number of composers who submitted demo reels based on the Qwest storyboards. "They were looking for a high-concept piece," recalls Moss. "They did not want music that sells the product. They wanted something surreal. So I gave them some bizarre remixes as reference, with trippy loop guitars and vocal pads—strange little synthetic voices—to give them an idea of what I had in mind."
"We wanted something different," notes Patti McConnell, partner/executive producer at the agency. "We needed to find the right aura, so we went a couple of rounds with three houses [over the course of about four weeks], before settling on Hayley. We believed that the exploratories were an essential part of the process. We needed to hear different pieces to help us determine how to tell the story. We wanted as many layers, as rich and unusual as possible."
After Moss was selected, the production of the track went relatively smoothly. "That demo of Hayley’s never changed drastically," states McConnell, who says that there were only small changes as the process unfolded. "We’d hear her tracks, then we’d give input, then there’d be revisions. We were making changes right up until the final mix."
To emphasize the ethereal quality of the music, the composer utilized many layers of her own voice and then processed them with long delays and reverbs. "I wanted to create the idea that the voice was coming down from the heavens—like the voice belonged to a higher power," she explains. "It was a lot of fun, and I could really use my imagination because [when I started] they were not locked into the picture yet. It’s a good process; you have more scope and the client doesn’t fall in love with a temporary music track. This is a very creative way to score."
Sound design was handled by Marc Healy, a sound designer at Mackenzie Cutler, New York. The ad was cut by editor Gavin Cutler. McConnell says that Healy’s sound work played an "important part" in setting the mood. As for the music, McConnell observes: "We were depicting a very strange environment. Hayley’s music really establishes the emotional element."r
