The top three picks in SHOOT’s fall music and sound design top 10 chart demonstrate how varied—and effective—spot music and sound can be, whether it’s a lush score, an old-fashioned jingle, or a great instrumental track.
"Puppet," for the Public Broadcasting System (PBS), out of Fallon, Minneapolis, and directed by Scott Hicks of Independent Media, Santa Monica, features a dramatic orchestral score that drives the exciting marionette show in the ad. Delta’s "The Seat," out of BrightHouse, Atlanta, uses quirky lyrics to illustrate the equally quirky image of a woman walking through the streets of Manhattan with a two-legged airplane seat; mono-monikered Jaume of bicoastal/ international Partizan directed the spot. And "Married Couple," directed by Hicks for AT&T Wireless, via Goodby, Silverstein & Partners (GS&P), San Francisco, uses a guitar-heavy track to trace the evolution of a couple’s argument.
Below, SHOOT looks at how these chart-topping soundtracks were created.
Number One
Will Richter of bicoastal/ international Amber Music composed the track for PBS’ "Puppet." Fallon has a history with Amber and PBS spots; the music company’s Mike Hewer composed the soundtrack for PBS’ "Fish," which recently won the primetime Emmy award for best commercial. (Alfonso Cuarón directed "Fish" through Independent Media.) "We gave [Amber] pretty loose direction, and let them take it where they wanted," says Fallon group head/copywriter Mike Gibbs.
As "Puppet" opens, we see a large tent exterior with a sign that reads, "Caputo’s Marionettes." A moving camera follows a boy as he goes inside and joins the crowd watching a puppet show. On stage, two marionettes—a Don Quixote-like figure on horseback and a villain on foot—are engaged in a sword fight. Accompanied by Richter’s rousing score, the spot deftly cuts between the puppets’ battle, the puppeteers manipulating the figures, and a rapt audience of children.
The horseman finally knocks his opponent down, and it looks like he is about to finish the job when the action—and the music—pauses. Suddenly, the horseman takes on a life of his own, glancing defiantly up at a very baffled puppeteer, and cutting himself free of his strings. The music surges as the liberated marionette gallops up the aisle of the tent, and rears his horse up in triumph at the exit. The tag: "Be more independent. Be more PBS."
Richter, who composed the orchestral score using samples, says he came up with the music by reacting to what he saw in the ad. "I always feel the music is embedded inside the commercial itself—the editing, the lighting, the pacing," he relates. "That stuff will tell you exactly the shape of the melody, harmony, counterpoint. A lot of what I do is reactionary; I take a cue from the film. [‘Puppets’] had such a vibrancy to it that the colors just spoke to me."
Richter set up a loop of the commercial just to let it sink into his subconscious—something he often does when scoring a spot. "When I actually sit down and [compose], it usually comes out in a burst," he says.
Sound designer/audio mixer Carl White of Brahmstedt White Noise, Minneapolis, also played an important role in the project. "What really ended up guiding the audience was the sound design, which is where the music cuts out," says Gerard Caputo, Fallon’s art director on the spot. "We used instrumental sounds for the actual sounds of the strings being cut so it felt more magical and more a part of the soundtrack."
For Brahmstedt, the spot’s key moment—when the puppet frees himself from his strings—had to be absolutely clear. "The music was scored such that there was no break there," he says. "Fortunately, there was a kind of pause [in the action, before the strings are cut]. As a feature of the sound design, I took that section and basically gave it an ending to open it up for some sounds that would hopefully draw your attention to what’s going on there."
Fallon was pleased with the results. "We were very happy with what they came back with," says Gibbs.
Number Two
Music has a starring role in Delta’s "The Seat." The spot opens on a woman sitting in front of her office computer, purchasing an airline ticket from the Delta Web site. When she prints out her boarding pass, an airplane seat with a pair of legs emerges from the printer—to the delight of the woman—and starts to follow her around.
The duo leaves the office together, as we hear a gentle male voice, accompanied by a guitar, singing, "We met on the Internet/We’re gonna go cool places I bet/We’re on our way just you and me/You’ll go with me because I want you to." It’s clear the song is about the odd, but sweet pairing. As the woman and her seat make their way through Manhattan to get to the airport, we hear lyrics about flying and various destinations. The song’s concluding line is: "Friends we will be ’cause it just feels right."
Composer Paul Bessenbacher of Admusic, Santa Monica, wrote the music for the spot, and also performed on the track. Markham Cronin, BrightHouse’s chief creative officer, and Danica Walker, the freelance agency producer on "The Seat," were impressed with Bessenbacher’s reel; additionally, Walker had worked with Admusic in the past. (Rich Rauh of Margarita Mix de Santa Monica was the audio mixer on the spot.)
"The spot itself is this little sweet story of two friends going on a trip," says Cronin. "I wanted the music to be heartfelt without going over into the ironic or cynical. The basic concept of the spot is to demonstrate a very concrete product benefit, which is that you can [choose your seat online and] print out your boarding pass. Visually, it was very quirky and weird. The music could have taken it to a darker place because you have this headless seat with human legs walking around New York City. But we wanted it to have this warm, celebratory feeling, and the music brought that happy sense to life."
Cronin wrote the lyrics of the song himself. "I have a three-year-old, so I’ve been reading Dr. Seuss out loud a lot," he says. "There’s a certain sort of rhythm to the flow. I sat down one night and banged out six or eight stanzas of lyrics—a lot more than we actually used. I e-mailed them to Paul Bessenbacher, and he simply sat down with the guitar and banged out a couple of demos with the lyrics I had written."
"It was obviously a very simple track, just acoustic guitar and singing," explains Bessenbacher. "With that as a basis, I was trying to make a very sincere song."
"The demos were amazingly close to what we ended up producing," says Cronin. "You instantly knew how well it worked. [Paul’s] voice was perfect; his performance was great."
Bessenbacher was also happy with the final version of the ad. "[‘The Seat’] looks great and it’s charming," he says. "The picture and the song capture the same vibe, which was very important."
Number Three
AT&T Wireless’ "Married Couple" opens with a couple uneasily going through their morning rituals together. It’s clear the pair has had a fight—neither is speaking to the other. They sit in their kitchen in silence, each glancing over when the other isn’t looking. They drive to work together, the woman staring out her window. Later, at their respective jobs, they’re still troubled by the quarrel. Sitting at her desk, the woman stares at a photo of her and her husband taken during a happier time; similarly, the man notices an affectionate couple in a park.
A fantasy sequence follows, where we see the man walk into a conference room where his wife is attending a business meeting. He holds up placards that read, "I’m an idiot" and "I’m sorry." Cut back to reality. The man has apologized, but via AT&T Wireless’ text messaging service. The woman looks down at her phone’s screen and reads his message—"I’m sorry." She smiles and keys in, "Me too." The end tag: "For your most important messages, reach out."
Accompanying the images throughout the spot is an instrumental score that underlies the feelings of the couple. Composer Christopher Kemp of bicoastal Elias Arts wrote the music for a rock trio with the purpose of shadowing the characters’ emotional arc. (Loren Silber mixed the spots via POP Sound, Santa Monica; he is now with Lime, Santa Monica.) "We didn’t want it to have that dated, syrupy-sweet feeling," says Harry Cocciolo, associate partner/creative director at GS&P. "We wanted it to be heartwarming, but in a contemporary way."
"[GS&P] gave us a clear idea of what they didn’t want," concurs Dave Gold, creative director at the Santa Monica office of Elias Arts. "The agency didn’t want us to make the commercial too sappy. They decided they wanted to go with something very raw and organic, something that had a timeless, traditional sense to it—maybe more like a recording from the sixties that was stripped down. You’re getting the emotion from that instead of trying to do big swelling strings or piano, or something that overplayed the emotional quality of the commercial. I wanted to keep it raw and let the actors tell the story."
"The spot’s music was really nice," notes Silber. "To me it perfectly matched the tone of the spot. It has a lonely, sad sort of feeling at first and then when the husband bursts through the door the mood changes. It’s one of those pieces that really gets the emotions swelling because we’ve all been in that uncomfortable silence of a disagreement with a loved one where someone is waiting for the other to apologize."
Silber relates that his job was make the music work with very subtle sounds in the background. "My role in the spot was to mix the music in with the very light sound effects in the spot and the end voiceover," he explains. "There are a couple of sound effects that you can barely hear, like the voice of the boss in the business meeting. I think it’s great that you can’t really hear what is going on in reality because you are kind of in her head, not really listening, but thinking about the disagreement.
"[Elias Arts] did a wonderful job of keeping [the score] very elegant and simple," says Cocciolo. "And yet it becomes a bigger player at the end. It closes the circle so you know exactly what you’re supposed to feel for these people."
Composers at Elias are currently working on additional AT&T Wireless spots, and have also teamed with GS&P to work on commercials for clients such as Saturn, Discover and eBay.
Gold is clearly satisfied with the job his company did on "Married Couple." "I think we really accomplished what we set out to do," he says. "You look at it, and it’s an emotional spot, but you don’t cringe. It has a hip factor and an emotional factor all in one."
