In an interesting branding endeavor, Ford is promoting it vehicles in :45 to :60 music videos on the hit reality show American Idol. J. Walter Thompson (JWT), Detroit, conceptualized the end-of-the-show clips, which star the contestants that remain each week. Roger and Scott Wojahn of Wojahn Bros Music, Santa Monica, produced and arranged the music in the videos, which directors Bill Fishman, Gavin Bowden and Stefan Smith at The Board, Santa Monica, the branded content division of Plum Productions, directed. Carl Spresser was executive producer for JWT.
This season, there will have been a total of 11 videos featured in the show. In them, the Idol wannabes cover popular songs like Stray Cats’ “Rock This Town” and Nikka Costa’s “Everybody Got Their Something.” The first video included 12 contestants; the number has been whittled down each week.
Ideally the Wojahn brothers would work with the contestants each weekend on the clip set to air the following week. In less ideal weeks, they had to work from two to four weeks in advance. In that case, the Wojahns had to record each possible combination of voices because some of the contestants would not be around when the video finally aired. Also, the music house wouldn’t know until the video was shot who would be featured in various scenes. The Wojahns would then remix the final version of the song two days before it aired.
Working with these amateur contestants, the Wojahns were part producers and part vocal coaches. “[The contestants] had never been in a recording studio environment, they don’t know whether or not they should even wear one headphone or both sides of the headphones, they all sing in a different style. Some people slide up through the notes, some people just hit them–they end the words differently,” Roger Wojahn related. “So getting them to sing as a group was actually one of the hardest parts of the job because some of them were just not good singers and even the ones that were wouldn’t necessarily sing the same way.”
For Scott Wojahn, the biggest challenge was getting the track to sound like it did in the original version. “There is a big difference between having it sound like a wedding cover band or a Top 40 band at a local bar, and making it sound like the record,” Roger Wojahn added.
For Roger Wojahn, the challenges included working with the individual personalities who were in a competition against one another. “We had a whole room full of big egos but still sort of shy and extremely unprofessional singers–not that they didn’t behave professionally but they didn’t know what they were doing as singers in the studio. Trying to get them to sound great and asking things of certain people without embarrassing them in front of their peers or singling people out because they were either good or bad and keeping their egos in check, it was delicate,” he said. “We couldn’t be quite as straightforward, maybe, and efficient as vocal producers as we would with pros.”
Marisa Mastroianni David was executive producer at Wojahn Bros Music. Dara Norris and Megan Wallis were also producers. Francis Buckley was the recording engineer.
Cody Ryder was executive producer at The Board.