This year’s race for the fourth annual primetime commercial Emmy Award was not without excitement. When the nominees were announced, one spot, Monster.com’s "When I Grow Up," directed by Bryan Buckley of bicoastal/international hungry man, out of Mullen, Wenham, Mass., was almost immediately disqualified because it had premiered prior to the eligibility date for Emmy consideration.
The ad was quickly replaced with Ameritrade’s "Let’s Light This Candle," directed by Dewey Nicks of bicoastal Epoch Films via OgilvyOne, New York. That ad joined fellow nominees "Whassup/ True" for Budweiser, out of DDB Chicago; Nike’s "The Morning After" via Wieden+ Kennedy (W+K), Portland, Ore.; Electronic Data Systems’ "Cat Herder," through Fallon, Minneapolis; and Federal Express’ "Action Figures," out of BBDO New York. The slate on Emmy night was a little different, though, when "Let’s Light This Candle" was conspicuous by its absence. That spot, too, was disqualified because its premiere date was prior to the eligibility requirement; "Let’s Light This Candle" was replaced by Nike Golf’s "Driving Range" for W+K.
All of this made for a rather interesting Emmy race, but equally interesting are the artisans behind the commercials that were up for the prestigious award. This week’s Special Report pays homage to the audio mixers on these spots. Below is what they say about the nominations, as well as about their recent work.
Loren Silber
Nike’s "The Morning After" is the one Y2K event that lived up to expectations. The spot, which presents the possible disaster of New Year’s Day 2000, won the Emmy for best commercial. Directed by Spike Jonze of bicoastal/ international Satellite via W+K, the ad made audio mixer Loren Silber’s year.
"It was my favorite spot to work on last year," says Silber, who mixes commercials out of POP Sound, Santa Monica. "It was a really thick track with all kinds of background, all kinds of everything—sound effects, explosions, people running—just about anything you can think of. It was just like a movie, only it was really short."
In the spot, a man awakens on New Year’s Day, with evidence of a party all around him. He pulls on his Nikes, and goes out for a run. As he jogs through the city streets, it is evident that the coming of the year 2000 has caused major problems: Cash machines are spewing money, a riot breaks out, tanks are in the streets, and a giraffe has escaped from the zoo. The jogger is oblivious to all the chaos, and only acknowledges a fellow runner, who has a similar sense of focus.
Silber recalls the audio mix as a difficult one. The original sound design package was supplied by Ren Klyce of Mit Out Sound, Sausalito, Calif., and had 24 separate tracks. Silber credits Klyce for much of the spot’s audio wizardry. "Ren was really the creative force there," he relates. "Basically, my job on this was to take Ren’s sound design and make it work together and accent the things he wanted accented. I did a couple of things with the music."
What Silber did with the music was to take a newly cut track of "Auld Lang Syne," and "age" the tune, so it had more of the vintage feel that W+K was looking for. "We added some snap and pop and took out some of the instruments to make it [seem older]," says Silber. The mix took 16 hours over two days, and Silber recalls W+K’s revisions as "minor tweaks" here and there.
Silber knew he was working on something special the moment he saw the rough cut. "I looked at it and went, ‘Wow, this is going to be terrific, especially with sound,’ " he relates. "There are so many different environments. It’s a great chance to show off a ton of different sound effects. Plus, it didn’t have a voiceover, which was nice."
Klyce brought Silber into the project after the sound design was completed. "The way Ren works is he gets the rough cut and works on it basically unsupervised for a while, then presents a rough mix to the producer. Then he brings it to me for the final step, where he gets to sit back and sort of be a client and listen and direct the way things will go," explains Silber.
The road to mixing audio for an Emmy-winning spot began at a recording studio in Nashville. Silber found himself touring a recording studio there, and fell in love with audio engineering. In 1988, he graduated from the University of Miami with a degree in audio engineering. John Binder, who mixed another Emmy nominee, Budweiser’s "Whassup/ True," gave Silber his first audio gig as an assistant at now defunct Editel/ Chicago. While there, Silber discovered that he liked mixing spots best. A few of Silber’s recent spot credits include: Kinko’s "Orange Crop," directed by Jeff Gorman of JGF, Hollywood, via TBWA/ Chiat/Day, Los Angeles; DirectTV’s "Lean Years," out of Deutsch, Los Angeles, and helmed by Melodie McDaniel of Palomar Pictures, Los Angeles; and PeerLogic’s "Kids" and "Monsters," directed by Trevor Robinson of Quiet Storm, London, through Camp/ Arbues, San Francisco.
When a slot for an audio mixer opened up at POP Sound in ’95, Silber was hired for the job. The move to California suited Silber. "In Los Angeles, you get to work on more of the image campaigns, versus the meat-and-potatoes product stuff that you tend to do in Chicago. I like that," he says.
John Binder
John Binder, principal/sound designer/mixer at Another Country, Chicago, ran up a sizable long-distance bill creating the audio mix and sound design for Budweiser’s "Whassup/True," directed by Charles Stone of C&C Films/Storm Films, Brooklyn, N.Y. The oft-decorated spot was up for the Emmy for best commercial. Although it didn’t pick up that award, the ad has plenty more to its credit, including the Grand Prix at Cannes, the Grand Clio, and recognition in the humor category at the Association of Independent Commercial Producers (AICP) Show.
The high phone bill, Binder recalls, came about because of a need to create a football game soundtrack for "Whassup/True." The spot follows a series of phone calls made by a bunch of guys in different locations watching a football game on TV, using the now-famous phrase "Whassup." Recreating the game became necessary because the rough cut was assembled to an NFL game that aired on ABC’s Monday Night Football telecast, which DDB did not have the rights to. "What we did was go out and hire the two guys who do the Chicago Bears telecasts in Chicago," explains Binder, about creating the game. "Unfortunately, one of them was in Chicago and the other was in Arizona, so I decided to do an ISDN session."
DDB producer Kent Kwiatt threw Binder another curve ball: He wanted the play-by-play guys to be heard as if they were together at a game. Binder’s solution was to take a Green Bay Packers game he had taped, dub a fl-inch, and send it to Arizona. The tapes were then synched and locked for the ISDN session.
"We had one guy in Phoenix and another here looking at locked-up decks," says Binder. "We had a five-minute segment of a game we were creating, and [the two announcers] just went and went and went. They were professionals and knew what they were doing."
Add in a few crowd noises, some popping shoulder pads, a referee’s whistle, and the job is done—right? Not quite. Binder’s mix also had to accommodate several shifts in location as the storyline followed phone calls from living room to kitchen to other venues, with the game playing in the background. To lend the audio authenticity, Binder changed the acoustics and distance on the soundtrack as the locations changed, so that each location in the ad would really sound like a different room. "It’s a subtle thing but if you listen to it carefully, you can follow the commentary and the sounds as they move," Binder points out.
Binder, who was born in South Hampton, England, was raised in Wisconsin, "listening to crickets and frogs." He escaped to the University of Miami in the early ’80s to study music engineering, aiming eventually to become a studio session musician. "I knew the best way into the recording studios was actually to be an engineer," he recalls. "If you’re an engineer, you are right there [for them to use.] That was my strategy back then."
He landed a job at now defunct Editel/Chicago in ’84, and discovered that he liked mixing. The dream of becoming a session player was forgotten. He stayed at Editel for nine years, before moving to post company Cutters, Chicago, in ’93. Earlier this year, Cutters underwent some revamping: Its audio and sound design division became a separate entity, called Another Country, with Binder as principal (SHOOT, 2/18, p. 8.)
Binder says he knew that "Whassup/True" had a good chance to cop a number of awards as soon as he saw the concept. "It’s beautiful in its simplicity," he observes. "[The spot is] about guys being guys, hanging out together and enjoying a Bud."
Jimmy Hite
It’s a good thing that Jimmy Hite, who mixes spots out of Margarita Mix de Santa Mónica, likes cats, because he got an earful of meows and hisses while mixing the Emmy-nominated Electronic Data Systems spot "Cat Herders," directed by John O’Hagan of bicoastal/international hungry man.
"The challenge for me, other than it being a Super Bowl spot, was that it was mixed in Dolby Surround Sound. There were a lot of different perspectives to take into account with cats passing all around you and over your head," recalls Hite, who says he fell in love with the spot the first time he saw it in rough cut form at FilmCore, Hollywood.
"I just happened to be over there that day and it [‘Cat Herders’] was on the docket," he says. "Even in rough-cut form, it made me laugh out loud."
"Cat Herders" uses a documentary style, mock interviews and sweeping panoramic visuals to tell the story of a bunch of tough cowboys who herd cats, not broncos, for a living. The spot debuted during the Super Bowl. "Every line is just a crack-up," relates Hite. "The dialogue is just hilarious—it’s so deadpan, with real cowboys just out talking about their jobs."
To mix it to Dolby, Hite says, he was running 32 tracks on the DSP Post Station in his mixing room at Margarita Mix. "It was important to Fallon that all the perspectives were in there," explains Hite, "and that they were correct when moving in the audio spectrum of surround."
A second challenge came in folding the Dolby down to stereo and mono mixes, Hite says. "We also had to make it compatible for people who don’t have surround sound. The rooms here are set up for that, and that’s what we did in the course of mixing the spot," he reports. "We spent a lot of time going, ‘Okay, here’s how it sounds in surround. Here’s how it sounds on a TV. Here is how it’s going to sound on a crummy TV. And here is how it’s going to sound on a terrible mono TV out in the outback.’ "
It’s easy to see why Fallon turned to Hite, who has been a mixer in the Los Angeles market for quite some time. After graduating from the University of Illinois, Hite moved to Los Angeles in the early ’70s with the idea of becoming a session musician. One look at a session with Glen Campbell and Larry Carlton convinced him that "I wasn’t in their league." He knocked around a bit before finally studying the art of sound with Wally Heider, a legendary figure in the audio community who supplied the sound for the ’67 Monterey Pop Festival.
While doing a freelance mix job years later, Hite met up with Jim Bredouw and Sonny Blueskyes, the owners of L.A. Studios. (Margarita Mix de Santa Mónica, Margarita Mix a lá Hollywood, L.A. Studios, and Zona Playa, Santa Monica, are all part of the L.A. Studios Inc. family of audio houses.) After meeting the duo, Hite started working freelance out of L.A. Studios in the early ’90s. The association became permanent and Hite moved out to Margarita Mix de Santa Mónica when the facility opened two years ago.
Hite’s recent credits include 12 spots for a Microsoft Network campaign through McCann-Erickson, New York; a series of Nissan and Infiniti commercials via TBWA/ Chiat/Day, Los Angeles; and a Coors Light ad out of Fallon.
Robert Feist
Robert Feist, mixer/owner of RavensWork, Venice, Calif., discovered the perfect object to imitate the sound of a golf ball dropping onto a fairway—an actual golf ball. He made the discovery while doing the audio mix and sound design for "Driving Range," one of two Nike spots out of W+K that were up for the commercial Emmy.
Nike’s "The Morning After" copped the Emmy, but that doesn’t take away from the quality of "Driving Range," helmed by Lasse Hallstrom via Propaganda Independent. (Hallstrom now helms ads via bicoastal/international @radical. media.) In the spot, the world’s worst golfers are lined up, busy slicing and hooking shots all over a driving range, until golf phenom Tiger Woods shows up and quietly goes about the business of hitting perfect drives. The others start to imitate Woods’ swing, and a gaggle of perfectly hit drives starts flying, until Woods picks up and leaves, and the imitators immediately revert to their bad forms.
"I love the spot, and I’m very flattered that it was nominated for an Emmy," says Feist. "I was lucky to be able to do both the sound design and the mix on it, because that’s somewhat rare for me."
Feist did the design work in what turned out to be an eight-hour session. He used some library sounds, primarily for the golf swings, and created a few, like the golf ball dropping onto the green. "We fooled around dropping different things," reports Feist, of his efforts to capture a ball hitting the green. "But finally we wound up with a golf ball on a carpet. Then I added a grassy element to it, kind of a crunchy sound."
Feist’s work was then paired with an arrangement of "Swan Lake" by editor Peter Wiedensmith of Joint, Portland, Ore. (Joint is the in-house editorial arm of W+K.) Feist says the design was relatively simple, except for the sheer number of sounds. "There are hundreds of golf swings in there, and balls dropping and stuff like that, and I had to add them all one at a time," he recalls. A follow-up corrective audio session the next day with W+K was relatively painless and the spot was ready to ship.
Feist notes that when he locked down and laid back the audio, he had no inkling that "Driving Range" would wind up with an Emmy nomination: "I really liked the spot and the way the sounds came together, but I had no idea."
"Driving Range" is the first Feist-mixed spot to be nominated for an Emmy, but he is no stranger to awards—the walls in his shop are adorned with gold and platinum records earned during his days mixing records for rock stars such as Stevie Nicks and Belinda Carlisle.
Feist’s trip to the audio profession started in his native Denver, where he took a few audio engineering courses in the mid ’70s. "I didn’t fall into this by accident," he says. "I wanted to be a recording engineer. There were no schools at that time that really taught it, so I went to a small school that gave you some courses and gave you some hands-on experience."
Feist started doing live mixes for bands before relocating to Los Angeles in ’77. A stint as an assistant at The Music Grinder, Hollywood, followed. A few years later, he moved to MCA Music, Universal City, Calif., to cut demos for writers before going freelance for 11 years. His next affiliation was in the early ’90s, when he joined Margarita Mix, Hollywood, to mix spots. "I had wanted to try mixing films for a long time because the element of a picture being involved fascinated me," Feist recalls. He left Margarita Mix in ’95 for a brief stint at POP Sound, Santa Monica, before exiting to open RavensWork. His most recent spot credits include "Bumper Sticker" for the U.S. Air Force, through Siegel & Gale, New York, and directed by Bob Richardson of bicoastal Morton Jankel Zander.
Happy doing spots, Feist says that mixing is the best part of the production process because it is the end of the line. "People are finishing a project they’ve been working on for months," he explains, "and they’re kind of celebratory and it all happens right there in my room. Everybody gets to see the finished product at that point, so they’re pretty excited."
Michael Marinelli
Michael Marinelli, mixer/engineer at Buzz, New York, admits he was surprised to discover that the Federal Express ad "Action Figures," directed by hungry man’s Buckley, was up for the Emmy. Marinelli mixed and created sound design for the spot, which was edited by Clayton Hemmert of Buzz’s sister company, bicoastal Crew Cuts. "It’s very surprising because I’m not one to submit that much material for awards," he says. "I think I’ve only submitted a piece for an audio award once in my life, because, frankly, I don’t have the time."
"Action Figures" opens on what appears to be a toy ad. Two boys are playing with Combat Rangers, which are G. I. Joe-like figures—the only problem is that the decidedly tough dolls are sporting dainty women’s clothing. Turns out the wrong shipper was used, and the real uniforms weren’t available in time for the "commercial."
"It’s been an overwhelming success from what was such a simple idea," reports Marinelli. "I think it’s great." Marinelli says that the sound design and mix turned out to be a lot more challenging than he first thought, because he and Hammert had to consciously pull back from their natural inclination to be creative, in favor of banality. "It looked like a very simple, straightforward thing that turned out to be a lot more difficult than it looked," explains Marinelli. "It was being edited by a really good editor, who cuts a lot of comedic spots. But here we had to cut it so that it looked and sounded like a kids’ toy commercial. There was a lot of playing around with effects so that it didn’t sound too real versus what you would expect to see in a typical commercial made for kids. We had to make the sound effects real, but not to the point that it [was too real.]"
To solve the problem, Marinelli and Hammert went to the stock library; Hammert cut a rough and the pair proceeded to add explosions and gunfire. "We did the initial sound design and mix before it was ever presented to someone who had any say in the creative," notes the mixer. "Sometimes it’s very difficult to judge something just by seeing the visual cuts while having someone standing there describing how ‘We’re going to put in a sound effect here and music there.’ Then we presented it to the agency and made changes. That went on for a couple of weeks."
Marinelli grew up in western New York and graduated from the State University of New York, Fredonia, in ’85, with a degree in film and television. A musician since he was a kid, Marinelli wanted to work in the music industry. After graduating, he moved to Los Angeles in ’87, and landed at The Post Group, Hollywood, as an assistant to the operations manager. He transitioned to the audio department in ’90, and was a full-fledged mixer by ’91. In ’94, after a stint at Hollywood Digital, he accepted an offer to start Buzz.
Marinelli thinks "Action Figures" is great, but admits that the commercial confuses his five-year-old son. "He thinks it’s a real spot and can’t understand why the characters are in dresses."p
