The wonders of nature represent the bond shared between the number one and two entries in our Spring Top 10 Spot Tracks chart: Discovery Channel’s “Boom Dee Ya Da” and GE’s “Clouds,” respectively.
In the case of the former, add to natural wonders the varied achievements of humankind taking front and center stage. Meanwhile, “Clouds” gives us a tongue-in-cheek depiction of what goes into a rainstorm with the real-life bottom line being the marvel of nature’s ability to recycle water.
Click here for SHOOT’s 2008 Spring Spot Tracks Top Ten Chart
Beacon Street Studios, Venice, Calif., was the music/sound house on Discovery Channel’s “Boom Dee Ya Da,” which was directed by James Rouse of Outsider USA in Santa Monica, for agency 72andSunny, El Segundo, Calif. The spot is part of Discovery Channel’s “The World is Just Awesome” campaign.
And behind the music for GE’s “Clouds” was New York shop Frisbie. “Clouds” was directed by the Traktor collective from bicoastal/international Partizan for BBDO New York.
SHOOT talked with the music/sound house artisans on both jobs to get insights into the creative genesis of their work.
“Boom Dee Ya Da”
This anthem promo for Discovery Channel opens with two astronauts on a space walk looking back at the big blue marble known as planet Earth. “Never gets old, huh?” says one. The other responds, “Nope.”
“Kind of makes you want to break into song,” notes the first astronaut.
The two hold hands and begin singing an inspired rendition of the campfire song “Boom Dee Ya Da,” except with lyrics that fit and accompany visuals of unfolding wonders all over the world. And the voices change from one person to the next–including a number of Discovery Channel show hosts and notables–as they experience those wonders.
For example, we see a man standing amidst flowing lava from a volcano crooning, “I love magma,” while Mike Rowe, the host of Dirty Jobs, is crawling in what looks like a sewer tunnel with rats, declaring “I love dirty things.” When he utters the “Boom” portion of “Boom Dee Ya Da,” Future Weapons host Richard “Mack” Machowicz fires a futuristic like bazooka shell at a building compound, triggering an explosion. Bear Grylls of Man vs. Wild sings as he holds a tarantula, singing about his love of arachnids. Also presented are breathtaking scenes of oceans, the mountains, a tornado, a giant squid, commercial fishermen in the deep blue, a skydiver plummeting toward caves, and an archaeologist working on an Egyptian mummy. With a mix of piano accompaniment, orchestral backing and a gospel choir, the visuals continue to amazingly dazzle, including a shot of the wheelchair-bound rockstar theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking uttering “Boom Dee Ya Da,” which follows a Myth Busters host putting an ignited torch to his flame resistant suit-clad colleague.
Finally we return to the astronauts floating about in space. A supered message, “The World is Just Awesome,” appears and then the Discovery Channel/planet Earth logo.
The composers of this inspired rendition of the “Boom Dee Ya Da” campfire song were Beacon Street Studios’ Andrew Feltenstein and John Nau. Brian Chapman of Beacon Street was the sound designer.
For Feltenstein, there was a balancing act on a couple of fronts–between the simple piano underscore and the rich orchestral accompaniment, and between the unprofessional voices and the gospel choir. This mix, he observes, helped to heighten the feeling of wonder while at the same time keeping it real and human. He adds that the neighborhood gospel choir’s performance instilled a soulful, inspiring feel which aligned just right with the spirit of the spot.
Nau also talks of maintaining a delicate balance. “It sound simple but it isn’t. We wanted to make a nursery rhyme-like campfire song feel orchestral,” he relates. “It’s part of the bigger theme of making the wonders of the world simultaneously feel both homey and larger than life.”
For sound designer Chapman, there were a couple of prime challenges. “We didn’t have a lot of footage to work with early on. Instead we primarily had storyboards and descriptions of scenes so we had to use our imaginations. We had to ask ourselves, ‘What’s this place going to sound like?’ We used some stock footage at first just to get a feel for what we would be dealing with.”
The other challenge, continues Chapman, was making sure that each person singing sounded like he or she should in their respective environment–from an underground tunnel to a raging sea or outer space and so on.
“This project seemed like a giant jigsaw puzzle that was missing pieces a lot of the time,” observes Chapman. “Ultimately it was really kind of magical to watch and hear all the pieces come together.”
The audio mixer on “Boom Dee Ya Da” was Rohan Young of Lime Studios, Santa Monica.
“Clouds”
Innumerable buckets of water are hoisted skyward from oceans to the clouds high above. Workers dressed in white blend in with the clouds and empty the buckets into a giant planter pot. Rows upon rows of workers pass buckets from one to the next, filling the giant gardening pot and eventually tipping it over so that water pours out of its spout.
This assembly line-like gathering of workers performing tasks in unerring precision gives us a picture of how nature reuses water, all the while accompanied by a remarkable rendition of the Creedence Clearwater Revival hit “Have You Ever Seen The Rain?” (composed by John Fogerty) that is distinctly different from the original tune. The vocalist for the spot track version is JuJu Stulback.
Towards the end of the commercial, a voiceover relates, “Just as nature reuses water, GE water technologies turn billions of gallons into clean water each year, rain or shine.
The website address ecomagination.com appears, followed by the GE slogan tag, “Imagination at work.”
Well, music house Frisbie put its imagination to work, initially fashioning some original compositions tied to rain and water themes. “Then,” recalls Frisbie principal Mary Wood, “Rani Vaz [ BBDO New York’s director of radio/music production] almost as an afterthought mentioned ‘Have You Ever Seen The Rain?’ which led us to seek an arrangement that would turn that song on its ear.”
That ear-turning departure came from several elements as the piece was re-arranged and produced by Wood and her Frisbie colleagues PT Walkley and Scott Hollingsworth. For one, the Frisbie folks decided to give the tune a waltz feel, a distinctly different time signature from that of the original composition and at the same time most apropos for the “Clouds” storyline. And then there was the creatively inspired notion of having Stulback serve as the vocalist.
“JuJu gave it a different feel on several levels–not just as a female voice, but she has a different style and is from Brazil. She truly wasn’t all that familiar with the song which was to our advantage, making it easier for her to just take off and do her own vocal interpretation.”
The first interpretation turned out to be the one BBDO used for “Clouds.” It was selected from several other subsequent Frisbie arrangements. “But that first one rang the most true to the spirit of the commercial,” says Wood.
Stulback, lead singer of The Mosquitos, reflects the up-and-coming talent that Frisbie taps into for the advertising world. It’s a talent range that extends from new, on-the-rise artisans to established stars in hip-hop and other genres.
In fact Frisbie’s producer/composer/engineer/musician Hollingsworth is currently producing Stulback’s CD album “Chris & JuJu,” Chris being the guitarist/drummer/singer from The Mosquitos. Hollingsworth is also working with Sean Lennon not only on pre-pro for the artist’s next CD but also a film score.
Meanwhile Walkley has scored three features from director Edward Burns: Purple Violets, The Groomsmen and Looking For Kitty. Under the Frisbie banner, Walkley has turned out several ads, including MasterCard’s animation spots “Small Business Land” and “Small Business Trip,” both for McCann Erickson, New York.
Wood is a spot music veteran, having served a lengthy tenure at Crushing Music, New York, before launching Frisbie two years ago.
Putting our head back into “Clouds,” though, the sound design played an integral role in concert with the music. The sound designer was Marc Healy of Mackenzie Cutler, New York, who notes that there were some logistical challenges.
“The job entailed a lot of visual effects so when I started the sound design I couldn’t see the final imagery, how the clouds would actually look, the entire environment. I had to imagine what things would look like based in large part on the storyboards and what the creatives communicated to me,” relates Healy. “Ultimately it was about being true to the situation, which entailed the real sounds of water, how these workers should sound as they went about their business–yet at the same time infusing the spot with an ethereal, heavenly quality. You’re closer to heaven up there we tried to give it a heavenly feel.”
The other challenge was that for some time Healy was working with a music score that was doing some of what he wanted to accomplish in terms of sound–only to have it replaced with the final Frisbie rendition of “Have You Ever Seen The Rain?”
“This meant some adjustments needed to be made in my sound design so that it would work well with the new music,” says Healy. “The singer did a great job and things came together pretty naturally.”
All the while, though, from a sound design perspective, Healy notes that he had to be conscious of properly building the sounds of water to set up the onset of the major deluge when the pot is tipped over.
The audio post mixer on “Clouds” was Michael Marinelli of New York-based Buzz.
Incidentally, Frisbie has produced a full-length version of Stulback’s rendition of “Have You Ever Seen The Rain?” which is slated to become available on iTunes.
