Over the course of several weeks, SHOOT has received reels from more than 50 music houses vying to have their spots included on the winter 1999 list of Top 10 spot tracks. The editors at SHOOT spent many hours watching and listening to these submissions as well as calling in other entries, ultimately selecting 10 spots, which are among the most impressive recent examples of music and sound design in commercials. The following top three are in a class of their own, demonstrating the imagination and creativity of the composers and sound designers who work in this industry.
Number 1: "Synchronicity"
The Volkswagen Jetta spot "Synchronicity," directed by Gerard de Thame of bicoastal HSI Productions via Arnold Communications, Boston, features a groovy beat that has virtually become a cult hit. Cyber surfers are downloading the tune from the German automaker’s Web site and Volkswagen car dealers are being sent promotional CD singles of the popular track.
Peter DuCharme, the spot’s composer/sound designer, says he thought the spot "would be a neat thing" but he never anticipated it would be such a hit. DuCharme, who launched Sommerville, Mass.-based music house Master Cylinder last spring, says he is constantly asked to describe the style of music, a question he says he has difficulty answering. "People say "what would you describe it as?’ I’m like "I don’t know, new rock…it’s so minimal." DuCharme used a guitar, bass, drum machine and synthesizer to compose and sound design the track, which was created at 94 beats per minute.
The :60 opens with a man and a woman cruising down a New Orleans street in a black VW Jetta during a light rain storm. The woman pops a cassette into the stereo, and on comes DuCharme’s "new rock" tune. As the couple slowly glides down the street in their sleek Jetta, they notice that the activity on the street-including a young man playing basketball, delivery men unloading boxes from a truck, a shopkeeper sweeping the sidewalk and a man playing with a yo-yo-is in sync with the music. The Jetta’s windshield wipers and turn signals are also in synch with the track. The harmony of the music and street activity is shattered when a passing truck splashes the Jetta’s windshield with water. "That was interesting," the man says, as he turns off of the street. "Sometimes everything just comes together," continues the voice-over, adding, "on the road of life there are passengers and there are drivers."
DuCharme came on board after the spot was edited to a click track. "I think the hardest part was trying to come up with the initial musical idea, everything else was fairly simple. I wrote some music to that click track, scored that and gave that back to them and we tried some revisions to make it more obvious because we were concerned that the music and the visuals wouldn’t hit home," he says. DuCharme adds that the revisions "started to dilute it a little bit, so we pulled that and trusted people’s perceptions and it worked, luckily."
Arnold Communications’ VP/creative director Lance Jensen says the music is "100%" crucial to the spot. "The music is really central to the idea of it being in synch. We really wanted to have a sort of dreamy, sort of hallucinatory trippy kind of feel to it."
DuCharme says he enjoyed "the idea" of the spot. "Like wouldn’t it be weird if you truly were in a car when the violin sound came up and red stop lights started? That would be a trippy thing."
Number 2: "Try"
Nike’s "Try," a :30 directed by Ralf Schmerberg of bicoastal/ international radical.media via Wieden & Kennedy, Portland, Ore., puts a bit of a twist on the old adage "if you don’t succeed at first, try, try again." The black and white spot features children and teenagers shooting hoops in playgrounds and gymnasiums. Instead of scoring with perfect slam-dunks, these NBA hopefuls miss every shot. The spot, shot in Los Angeles, concludes with the tagline "I can accept failure but I can’t accept not trying," followed by Nike’s Air Jordan logo.
Elias Associates composer Michael Sherwood and creative director Jonathan Elias, both of whom are based at the bicoastal music house’s Santa Monica facility, worked on the spot’s upbeat original piece of music played against the backdrop of failed basketball shots. Sherwood, who joined Elias Associates in July ’96, says the music is "just straight ahead b-bop scat."
"[The music] is like Ella Fitzgerald meets Duke Ellington old type of style," adds Elias. "We came to it by the feeling that it really felt like a lot of fun and it was a nice contrast to the picture."
Wieden & Kennedy producer Henry Lu echoes Elias’ sentiments. "The music is critical; it juxtaposes what’s happening with the film," he says. "All of these guys are failing miserably, yet they are still happy about it, so I think it reads the picture really well…it tells you exactly what these people are feeling."
Elias says creating appropriate music for the piece was the most challenging aspect of the spot, which took about two days to complete. "The concept was really the challenge. Finding something that was uplifting and really giving it a sense of fun."
But once Elias and Sherwood decided on the type of music they would create, Sherwood says composing was "pretty smooth" and that "it all fell into place pretty easily, strangely enough."
Sherwood says listening to the scat vocals of Patrick Tuzzolino, the Los Angeles-based jazz singer who was enlisted for the spot, was "like being tickled". "He’s just a great scatting, improvising singer. It was just fun to watch how the improvised jazz worked around the images and sometimes there was a lot of cool serendipity going down."
Number 3: "Theater"
In Sempra Energy’s "Theater," the San Diego-based energy services holding company plugs its recent installation of a new heating and cooling system in Los Angeles’ Shubert Theater. The :30, directed by Mark Coppos of bicoastal Coppos Films out of San Francisco’s Goldberg Moser O’Neill, opens with wide shots of the theater’s interior and a custodian sweeping the carpet. Meanwhile, a mysterious, loud fluttering sound fills the theater, eliciting a bewildered look from the custodian. The voice-over says that the system Sempra Energy installed in the theater is "one that’s so efficient and quiet, chances are you’ll hear every little sound on stage." The camera then reveals the source of the mysterious fluttering sound-a month whipping around a stage microphone.
Machine Head, a Venice-based music house, worked on the spot’s sound design. Machine Head owner/president Stephen Dewey created the sound of the moth by recruiting his loyal dog Jackson, a longhaired Dachshund. Dewey says he "induced him [Jackson] to flap his ears a whole bunch" to achieve the sound of a moth. "I noticed the dog’s ears flapping and I thought they would be great for the moth sound," he says, "and when the client wanted to explore something new, I was all over it."
According to Goldberg Moser O’Neill president/chief creative officer Brian O’Neill, "the idea was that you would never know what was going on for 27 seconds, you need to be engaged and involved strictly through or primarily through the sound design."
Before deciding to go with Jackson, Dewey says he and assistant Mike Johnson "went through a couple of days of all kinds of thumping, hitting, slapping towels, sheets, flags, rope-everything to get that sound."
"Initially there had been a previous version where we had used helicopters and all kinds of heavy duty noises to get that sound, but ultimately it didn’t work-it didn’t seem organic enough," Dewey recalls.
O’Neill says he embraced Dewey’s decision to use Jackson. "When Stephen first did it [the spot’s sound design], he had a real interesting sound, but it didn’t quite hit the tension. Then he hit the brilliant idea of recording his dog’s ears flapping which was just ingenious."
Dewey says it was difficult to create a sound that meshed with the actions of the moth. "What was challenging was getting a sound that seemed plausible…All of the sounds were either too big or too little or just didn’t sound like they were going to fit," Dewey says. "Another thing is the erratic nature of the wings. You don’t look at them and have a sense of a constant thump, thump, thump, like say, a helicopter has."
Once Dewey decided that Jackson’s ears would generate an "organic" sound, he says completing the sound design was fairly straightforward.
"The process itself was really a process of elimination and once I eventually hit upon the dog’s ears, it was pretty straight ahead from that point on," Dewey says. "It was so organic, it was just a matter of accumulating enough bursts of ear flap, editing them together and then modifying."
Dewey enjoyed working on the spot because the Shubert Theater was not a typical space to work with, a challenge he says he embraced. "I especially liked working with perspectives and reverbs and room sizes. I loved it when the solution was so simple."k
