Kinka Usher wore two hats during a recent shoot for Apple via TBWA/Chiat/Day, Los Angeles. On the :60 "Beat," which promotes Apple’s iPod MP3 player, he served as both director and choreographer. Well, unofficial choreographer. More on that later.
The commercial opens on a bespectacled man (maybe in his late 20s, early 30s) sitting at a desk in his apartment, using an iBook laptop computer. His face is blocked by the screen, so we only see his eyes. It is quiet in the room, except for the sounds of his typing on the keyboard. Suddenly, we hear music: the rhythmic "Take California" track off the Propellerheads’ 1998 CD decksanddrumsandrockandroll.
Energized by the infectious music, the guy whips off his glasses and starts bobbing his head to the beat. We see that with just a few clicks, he has loaded the song from his iBook into his iPod. Ready to head out of the apartment, the guy disconnects the iPod from the iBook, and the music stops. He puts on his headphones, hits a button on the iPod, and "Take California" starts playing again. Transfer complete.
Mr. Dancing Machine is in full gear at this point, goofily grooving to the tune—dancing the way we all do when we’re home alone, and we think no one can see us.
Donning his coat, the guy continues to dance, even doing the moonwalk and the running man as he makes his way to the front door of his apartment. He slips the iPod into his jacket pocket, and boogies his way out the door.
A voiceover says: "iPod. A thousand songs in your pocket." That’s the only voice we hear during the commercial. The guy never utters a word—he communicates his joy and energy via his dancing. Therefore, it was crucial that the performer have all the right moves. He got a lot of them from Usher, who was confident enough in his own abilities as a dancer to choreograph the spot himself.
"I don’t know if I’m an incredible dancer, but I certainly like dancing, and I like moving," said the director, who works out of House of Usher Films, Santa Monica. "I didn’t want to hire a choreographer because I don’t like choreographers coming in and directing. It’s like, ‘That’s my job!’ And I’m very protective of that."
Usher has helmed a few Apple spots over the past year (including "Elope"), and the creative team at TBWA/Chiat/Day knew he was the right person for this job, too. "Apple’s not an edgy brand. We want to be accessible. It’s a friendly brand, and Kinka just has that feeling," explained Duncan Milner, the agency’s senior partner/creative director.
When questioned about Usher’s abilities as a dancer, Milner laughed and didn’t have much to say—although Maya Frey, the agency’s copywriter, testified, "I saw Kinka break out some moves in casting, and the actors would just look at him and go, ‘I don’t know if I can do that.’ "
Actually, casting the spot was "a brutal assignment," according to Frey. The agency held casting calls in Los Angeles, Toronto, Chicago, New York and London. "We knew exactly what we were looking for, which was somebody who was not too cool, somebody who didn’t take himself too seriously," Frey said. "We wanted somebody who was comfortable in his own skin."
It was important that the person to be cast appealed to the target audience for this spot: 25- to 35-year-old men. And at one point, the agency even scoured comedy clubs, looking for comedians who might work. But the comics were either too goofy or didn’t dance well enough.
"This spot was reliant on this character. You had to look at him and fall in love with him and pick up on his job and fun," explained Milner. "So we had to find the perfect guy." The perfect guy turned out to be an actor named Nitin Ganatra, whom they found in London.
Next came the music. "We were looking for something that was incredibly contagious," said Moe Verbrugge, TBWA/Chiat/ Day’s art director. "And we needed enough variation in the music so that Nitin could change his dance moves."
"Take California," released a couple of years ago, fit the bill. "The Propellerheads [a.k.a. Alex Gifford and Will White] were really gracious, and they allowed us to change the song slightly, edit it here and there for our purposes," Milner related.
With the actor and music in place, Usher was able to move into production. He shot the spot over two days in an apartment near downtown Los Angeles. "I did the whole thing hand-held," he revealed. "I didn’t want to have dolly shots or anything. I felt like keeping it lose and keeping it creative, and that meant the camera needed to be free and moving."
Usher also kept the production on schedule. "Kinka did a really good job with that," reported Milner. "We didn’t spend too much time at each setup. We got as many takes as we needed, but we moved fairly quickly."
The director is known for shooting very few takes. "The reason editors like me is, I basically edit in camera," Usher observed. "So what happens is, when you’re looking at my film, you’re not looking at 80 angles shot in 50 different takes. You’re looking at four angles shot in five different takes, and that’s what you’re going to get to cut with."
Generally, Usher gets involved in the editing process. But since he was scheduled to depart on a trip after this spot wrapped production, he wasn’t able to be in the edit room in person. He did, however, confer with editor Glenn Martin of Nomad Editing Company, Santa Monica, via phone. "This was a job that was pretty easy to put together," Usher said. "All the bits were there."
In fact, everyone involved in the project noted how smoothly this assignment went. "You’re not going to get any catastrophe stories out of this one," Usher cracked, laughing.
The worst thing that happened was Ganatra’s pulling a muscle in his neck while bobbing his head like a maniac during the first day of the shoot. That didn’t stop the trouper, though. "He was in pain the rest of the day," stated Milner. "But he just sucked it up."
