A whisper, a dog bark, a blaring boom box. These are among the sounds that we not only hear but also see in an imaginative new commercial for Hewlett-Packard (HP) created by Goodby, Silverstein & Partners (GS&P), San Francisco, and directed by Tim Hope of Passion Pictures, London. Hope is represented in the United States by bicoastal Notorious Pictures.
Titled "Bang & Olufsen," the :30 depicts live-action people in an animated park setting on an overcast day. In the background, we see a modern cityscape. The combination of live action and animation creates an otherworldly environment described by Hope as a "Danish utopia—a kind of pristine, futuristic, northern European heaven."
As the park’s inhabitants make sounds, we literally see the resulting sound waves emanating from them. Chirping birds are surrounded by circular flashes; an old man’s penny whistle playing generates gentle, rippling waves; the sweet nothings a woman whispers to her boyfriend appear as a slow-moving, spiral-like trail; a bike-riding boy’s whistling creates curved lines that grow in length as the sound travels from his mouth.
These softer sounds are interrupted when a dog barks at the boy on the bike. Time-slice photography freezes time, and the camera pans around the agitated dog, who is surrounded by a sound bubble. The bubble bursts, and the sound rushes over the startled boy.
Cut to a breakdancer. The beats emanating from his boom box release a wild mass of jagged lines and chaotic shapes. Time-slice photography is used again to slow down the breakdancer, who busts a move through the pulsing wall of music.
All this noise is too much for a man whose apartment overlooks the park. He closes his windows to shut out the cacophony, relaxes into a chair and closes his eyes as soothing waves of music from his Bang & Olufsen stereo system wash over him.
The phrase "Bang & Olufsen" is superimposed over the scene, as a voiceover says, "Bang & Olufsen relies on HP technology in the production of perfect sound."
The screen fades to black. The "Bang & Olufsen" dissolves as "+ hp = everything is possible" appears. The spot ends with the HP logo.
"Bang & Olufsen" is part of a campaign that aims to show consumers that HP is more than just "a printer and camera company," according to GS&P copywriter Michael McCommon. "This was a way to let the world know that HP is involved in all this other great technology, and Bang & Olufsen is one of the companies HP does a lot of work with," he noted.
High-end electronics maker Bang & Olufsen is renowned for the audio quality of its stereo equipment, so naturally the creative team at GS&P wanted to stress that—but they needed an original way to do so. Then, inspiration struck. "We thought, ‘What if you could see the sounds? What if they actually came alive, and you could see them, and you could see the different kinds of power they had in the world, and the different effects they had on people?’ " McCommon said.
Hence, a concept was born, but the best way to execute it was of concern. "I felt, personally, that a lot of the challenge was what do these sounds look like?" GS&P art director Steve Goldblatt related. "And how do we make them so that they don’t come across as cheesy or contrived or like something that we’ve seen before?"
Hope, a British director known for helming music videos such as Coldplay’s "Don’t Panic," which mixes 2-D and 3-D animation with live action, was brought on to tackle the job. The spot marked his first commercial job stateside.
The director, who is based in London, won the assignment on the strength of his reel and an eight-page treatment "that blew us away," McCommon said.
"It came across like a science paper," Goldblatt added.
VISUALIZING SOUND
Hope, who laughingly shared that he got quite a ribbing from the GS&P guys for his "dorky" science paper, was intrigued by the agency’s directive to visualize sound. "I found the scientific appeal of this quite interesting, and what I wanted to do was visualize sound in a 3-D way," Hope said. "When you think of visualizing sound, you think of [the classic Walt Disney animated feature] Fantasia and those little vibrating lines bouncing around to violin sounds. What was appealing about this was trying to visualize sound in ordinary situations."
At the outset of the project, Hope created a computerized version of the spot using Lightwave—carefully choreographing the action and live-action camera moves.
Hope and DP Alex Barbour then shot the live-action footage over three days at a park in East London. The most time-consuming shots involved the time-slice photography of the dog and the breakdancer. Hope said he used the time-slice technique because he wanted to "freeze sound and explore it in detail."
Hector McLeod, managing director/effects supervisor at Glassworks, the London-based visual effects shop that worked on the spot, was at the shoot to lend his technical expertise. He wanted to ensure that the slow-motion live action was achieved in-camera so that the visual effects team would have to "cheat the live action as little as possible."
"[On set], we were working out the best ways of moving the camera while being inside the slo-mo world," McLeod said. "You wanted big, arcing camera moves, but you were shooting slo-mo, so obviously it’s very difficult to have a big, arcing camera move when you’re shooting at a very high frame rate. The way we did this was with a time-slice rig which enables you to move the camera very fast whilst shooting very high frame rates."
Once the shoot was completed, the live action was tracked, and the camera tracking information was given to the 3-D team so that the live action and 3-D imagery would move in sync. The cloudy sky, the buildings in the background and much of the park itself, including the trees, were built in 3-D. Other effects in the spot were generated in both 2-D and 3-D.
The visual effects team worked to a temp soundtrack created by Hope. (The sound design that accompanies the final version of the spot was produced by stimmüng, Santa Monica; DJ Krush’s "Song 1" was licensed from Sony.)
The barking dog sequence in particular took a lot of work. The bubble of sound surrounding the dog was animated by hand, and the shards of light and distortion that shot outside of the bubble were made in 3-D. The 3-D team also created a model of the dog’s head that was actually placed inside the bubble.
But the most challenging aspect of the job—which took 10 weeks to produce, according to McCommon—was creating the look of the sound waves. "I tried to think of ways to make sound big and spectacular, and the brief was also to make sure each sound looked different," Hope said.
Weeks were spent animating the sound waves, and getting everyone to agree on exactly how the sound waves should appear was hardly a simple task. "Of course, everyone had their own idea of what sound would look like," Hope said. "Fortunately, the agency was pretty understanding and pretty much agreed with me on what sound looked like, but there was a fair amount of to and fro and things being taken out and put in. I imagine there was more [fuss on this job] than on most jobs because the nature of this was experimental."
"The whole animation process was a bit of a trip," said McCommon, who, along with Goldblatt, went to London to work on the project. "The way Tim animates, it’s kind of like making a painting. He just threw a bunch of stuff up on the screen, and then he had a whole room of animators pushing it and molding it. We had to put a lot of trust in him, and a lot of trust in the direction he was trying to take. There were a lot of people that we had to bring with it along the way who were nervous, but at the end everybody was blown away by it. It really came together."
