Grey New York is scoring creative kudos for its ongoing DirecTV campaign showing cinematic action put on DVR pause in one room of the house and then resumed in another room with the touch of a remote control button. Earlier this year, for instance, in “Robots,” a.k.a. “Ice Cream,” a man watches two futuristic robotic beings in combat as they tear apart his kitchen. As one bot is thrown against the kitchen wall, the man freezes the action. He then walks into the next room and presses his remote, resuming the battle as we see the robot break through the other side of the wall into the adjacent living room.
Next after freezing the action when one robot lifts the other through a shattering chandelier, our remote control-wielding man retires to the bedroom upstairs–there he resumes the action but instead of it making a shambles of that room, the robotic fight continues on his TV screen.
“Robots” made SHOOT’s Top Ten Tracks Chart in March and last week was honored in the Sound Design category of the AICP Show (Jay Jennings of Birdhouse Sound, L.A., was the sound designer).
Now Grey has arguably raised the DirecTV creative bar even higher with “Hot House,” which finishes number one in this quarter’s SHOOT Top Ten Tracks Chart. Whereas robots battling in a home is a surreal sci-fi scenario, “Hot House” seems all too real as we see a fire raging in a house. As a firefighter finds himself in the throes of the blaze, inexplicably a man calmly sits and watches the flames engulf the room. It’s not until a little later that we realize that this man is viewing a Backdraft-esque feature film as he goes from one room to the next in his home, using his DirecTV DVR which records in one room while enabling him to watch in any room. While the big-picture creative, production and visual effects aspects of “Hot House” are covered in this week’s Top Spot (see separate story), the music and sound represent the focus of this Chart-topping story.
From an agency perspective, the spot underscores the flexibility and open-mindedness of the Grey music team, which went with a composer it knew well and a sound designer whom the ad shop hadn’t worked with before.
On the former score, Grey director of music Josh Rabinowitz and agency music producers Ryan Duda and Zach Pollakoff selected and almost naturally gravitated to composer Robert Miller of stimmung once they determined the creative route they wanted to take. “After exploring different approaches,” related Pollakoff, “we felt that in the end a score that was highly cinematic and married to picture, that felt epic and dramatic, would work best.”
Rabinowitz observed, “What viewers are seeing on DirecTV is ‘a real movie,’ a real cinematic experience unfolding in dramatic fashion. We felt that Robert was an obvious choice for that kind of music. He has a lot of experience in features, working in Hollywood in that capacity to go along with his credits in commercials. We went with someone who could give us that big feature film feel.”
Duda added, “The physicality of the spot was unique–not just in terms of the fire but the pauses and freeze frames. The pause when you see the man calmly sitting while flames are throughout the room, and the pauses when he goes from one room to the other, freezing the action and then resuming it. These pauses interrupt the flow of music which is kind of cool but a huge challenge. You in effect have that much less time to tell the story musically.”
Open mind As alluded to, Grey selected a sound designer whom they hadn’t collaborated with previously. “We have our go-to people,” related Rabinowitz. “But you have to be open to different possibilities, particularly when people have done amazing work together–like a director and an editor, an editor and a sound designer.”
The latter applied to “Hot House” as editor Haines Hall of Spot Welders suggested some sound design talent to Grey, including Kim B. Christensen of Noises Digital, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
“We’re open to hearing from a trusted director, an editor about their great working relationships,” continued Rabinowitz. “You don’t just supersede those kind of relationships; you take them into consideration. We discovered Kim through Haines Hall and saw the potential of what he could contribute.”
DirecTV’s target audience is one that values blockbuster movies and likely has a-cut-above home entertainment speaker systems and other resources. “That’s why we wanted a bit of a visceral response to the sound design,” explained Rabinowitz. “The sound design shakes the room a bit. Your body reacts to that. Similarly some of those orchestral swells spark a physical reaction.”
Miller time
Composer Miller’s film scoring spans some six to eight features a year as well as ongoing work in commercials. The feature fare includes collaborations with directors like Eugene Jarecki on the documentaries Why We Fight and Reagan, and Jonathan Hock on The Lost Son Of Havana (chronicling MLB pitcher Luis Tiant’s return to his native Cuba), Off The Rez (the story of a native American family in Oregon who leaves the reservation to pursue the American dream for one of its children) and Rebuilding Ground Zero, a Steven Spielberg-produced film for television that brings together the Discovery Channel and DreamWorks.
Miller was immediately drawn to the DirecTV spot. He saw it as an opportunity to tap into his experience in commercials while bringing his film composer sensibilities to bear on the project. The major challenge, he said, was scoring each piece separated by pauses and freeze frames, and making the music somehow cohesive throughout to help advance the story.
“The freeze frames are quite dramatic–when the fireman falls through the floor, and the pause when the boy is being saved from the flames. You find yourself stopped in mid-sentence musically and then having to pick up again on a dime, all in the truncated time frame of a commercial,” said Miller. “My film composer colleagues often under-estimate the art of scoring commercials. I think if they worked on spots, they might more fully appreciate the form and its artistic challenges. I love oscillating back and forth between films and commercials. The disciplines are so different yet I embrace and am passionate about them for different reasons. I love those times when the two disciplines cross as in this DirecTV commercial.”
Sound design As it turns out, sound designer Christensen has a mix of feature and commercial experience and acumen somewhat akin to that of Miller, a dual orientation that proved ideal for “Hot House.” Christensen was introduced to the art of setting sound to picture when he got his first break as the assistant sound designer on Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, spending months creating werewolf sounds and scary ambiences, and directing actors for extra voices. The movie went on to win a Best Sound Effects Editing Oscar. Christensen later served as sound effects editor on Born to Be Wild, Judge Dredd and Se7en, and sound designer on Fly Away Home and Jakob the Liar. He has worked on more than 30 feature films with credits as sound designer, editor, supervisor and foley walker.
In ’99 Christensen launched Noises Digital as a sound design house tailoring each new spot with original sounds, newly recorded in the field or entailing work on the foley stage, garnering its first top prize in 2000 at the London International Awards. Commercial clients over the years have included adidas, American Express, BMW, Calvin Klein, Gatorade, Honda, Sony and Toyota.
“What intrigued me about this DirecTV project was it being a storyline with sound,” related Christensen. “They [the creatives at Grey] weren’t interested in the sound being over the top, which can become unreal. They wanted the sound to be as real as possible. Haines [editor Hall] is very good at laying down a base sound idea that has been thought out and provides a guideline as to what the agency and client are thinking, of what they need to realize. I’ve never used what the editor used, but Haines is adept at putting you on the right track. He helped put me in the right direction from the outset.”
Part of Christensen’s creative sound design goal was for viewers to feel the house. “Foley helped in this regard. I tried to capture the guy walking around in the house. You feel him walking about and you feel the house through his footsteps and what surrounds him. Even with all the fire, I like to be able to hear all the elements of the house. And you can use the fire to realize those elements, the ceiling and beam giving way, the crashing through the floor, the human elements. The scenes are not awash in sounds of flame. The flame moves and so does the sound. As the fire moves, you pick up the other sounds in the environment, the glass breaking, wood creaking, furniture ablaze. If you listen closely, the sounds of the flame and the different parts of the house change constantly. It’s not just a wall of flame, a wall of sound, that sits there. You hear the feet of the fireman and feel the heaviness of his equipment–the sound was completely foleyed. You hear the fire fighter’s oxygen mask as he moves through the room.”
Relative to the sounds he deployed, Christensen noted, “I don’t use a commercial library. All the stuff I recorded or created myself. There are sounds I’ve created and stored for use in different projects–which came to be part of this DirecTV piece. Mostly, though, the sounds are those I created specifically for this spot.”
The sound design and music in turn blend well to support and advance the story. Audio post mixer was Eric Ryan of 740 Sound Design.
