Solo piano improvisation, sampled instrumental sounds and a live chamber orchestra provided soundtracks for the top three picks on SHOOT’s winter music and sound design top 10 chart. Each piece of music found a distinctive way to contribute to the creative impact of three very different ads.
Volkswagen Phaeton’s "Rewire," directed by Malcolm Venville of bicoastal Anonymous Content, out of Arnold Worldwide, Boston, presents a score that riffs on those found in science documentaries. BMW’s "Summer Drive," directed by Jim Jenkins of bicoastal/international Hungry Man via Publicis in New York, features a spare, moody piano track and subtle sound design that underscores the spot’s quietly contradictory imagery. And "Cat in the Hat," a MasterCard movie tie-in spot for Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat uses rhyming voiceover, loopy sound design and a chamber ensemble; Jaume of bicoastal/ international Partizan helmed the ad through McCann-Erickson, New York. Below, SHOOT looks at the stories behind the three chart-topping scores.
Number One
Volkswagen’s "Rewire," a humorous :90, is a send up of science documentaries. "The idea behind the commercial was to do something that was disruptive and non-advertising like," says Alan Pafenbach, managing director/group creative director at Arnold. "So we decided to treat this as a sort of documentary … and the music was part of that idea. [The score] lulls you into a sense that you are watching [a documentary]."
As "Rewire" opens, an assuring male voiceover introduces us to the "Gasloli Neurological Center" as we hear the bell-like tones of the score, composed by Jeremy Adelman of Music for Picture, New York. The Institute is conducting experiments on human cognition. We witness a test in which a little girl is asked to sort images by shape—a blue boat and a red circle. The kid does fine. Then she’s asked to sort the images by color—the shapes are the same as before, but the colors have been reversed, so the ship is red and the circle is blue. She continues to sort them by shape. The voiceover tells us this is an example of "attentional inertia."
Next, a guy is asked to identify photos of luxury cars. He’s shown three images of the Phaeton—the new luxury car from Volkswagen—with its VW logo obscured, and he tells the tester he’s seeing images of a Mercedes-Benz, a Lexus and a BMW. He’s shown the same images again—this time with the logo in plain view—but he still misidentifies the features. The voiceover intones, "Soon Volkswagen will introduce a new kind of luxury car, the Phaeton. Which gives you a little time, at least, to totally rewire your brain."
"Right away, I knew it had to be a minimal thing," says Adelman of the score, which is made up of synthesized live instruments. "It shouldn’t be heavily orchestrated. [The agency] wanted the music to evolve over the course of the spot. We kept it really subtle so it was fluid, and everything connected."
According to Arnold creative director Dave Weist, who served as the copywriter on "Rewire," Music for Picture had to do a number of revisions because of various changes the spot went through. (Composer Peter DuCharme, also of Music for Picture, was involved in those revisions.) "We finally settled on the voiceover a little bit into the process, and that changed things," relates Weist. "We had to make some adjustments for the music to make sure it didn’t overpower [the voiceover], since that was really driving the spot."
Mike Secher of Soundtrack Recording Studios, Boston, served as the spot’s mixer. He tried to make "Rewire" sound like a documentary or an educational show, like PBS’ Nova. "My job was to mix things as they would have been [mixed] over the course of a show like that," he says. "That meant I used a lot of compression and a gentle EQ on the narrator and mixed the music very low in order to let the background sounds pop up here and there."
Pafenbach says that creating music for "Rewire" was a tough job well done. "[The soundtrack] had to be invisible in some spots and then point to things at just the right moment," he notes. "It was a very difficult assignment because we were asking [the composers] to make music that filled the void, but did not call attention to itself, which is completely contradictory. But somehow they were able to do it."
Number Two
Writing the classically flavored piano piece heard in BMW’s "Summer Drive" was no sweat for Mario Grigorov of bicoastal/international Amber Music. "I wrote the track [in the amount of time] it takes to hear it," says the composer. "[Then] I sat at the piano and improvised the chord changes. The second take I did was the one I kept."
Grigorov’s extensive experience playing both composed and improvised music is one reason why he was able to write something so quickly. A former concert pianist, Grigorov has recorded classically influenced jazz for Warner Brothers. He’s also toured as a supporting act for major jazz artists such as Wynton Marsalis and Joshua Redman, and played piano duets with New Orleans legend Ellis Marsalis. And you don’t have to look far to see the source of Grigorov’s musical inclinations: his father played trumpet in the Berlin Philharmonic under Herbert von Karajan, and his mother was a concert pianist.
"Summer Drive" shows a BMW driving through verdant surroundings, but as the car glides through the lush, green environment, the spot’s characters are all engaged in winter activities. For instance, bundled-up kids ride sleds down a hill and appear to be throwing snowballs, while other children make snow angels in the grass. A man appears to be shoveling snow off his lawn, but there is no snow on the ground. The score imparts a soothing yet wistful quality to the flow of subtle, dreamlike imagery. A voiceover notes: "With all-wheel drive, the BMW 3 Series grips like it’s summer, even when it’s not. Get a grip on winter."
"They wanted something with an emotional element to it," says Grigorov, referring to the brief that Publicis gave him. "It came easy for me to write something like [the score for ‘Summer Drive’]. It was just a perfect fit. … It was pure inspiration because the visuals were so strong."
Nadia Blake, the agency executive producer on "Summer Drive," says she and her team went with Amber because they were uncertain about what form the ad’s music should take. "We know [Amber has] a good array of talent," she says. "As we weren’t one hundred percent sure if we were going to end up with a classical piece, we thought it would be good to have an array of talent working on our spot."
But Publicis did have a general idea of what they wanted. "We were looking for a magical feeling," explains Blake. "We wanted to move away from obvious driving-type music. We wanted the viewer to be pointed in the direction that it was not reality, that it was a little bit playful."
Marc Healy of MacKenzie Cutler, New York, created the sound design for the spot, and also did the audio mix. "I had to basically recreate the sounds of winter," he shares. "But we also wanted it to be somewhat dreamlike, or rather, sound like what the memory of certain winter experiences sound like. We also wanted the sounds of the car to have that dreamlike quality while still sounding powerful and dynamic."
Number Three
MasterCard’s "Cat in the Hat" shows the zany character from the classic Dr. Seuss book going on a shopping spree. Accompanied by cartoon-like sound effects, the cat dashes through a wildly colored department store, snatching up items and piling them up in his arms. We catch glimpses of the cat’s hat and his back as he runs around. A rhyming voiceover describes the mad rush in Dr. Seuss-style lines: "A teapot, toy robot, some gadget they have not got. Toolkit, oven mitt, a pink, polka-dotted dress you hope fits. Goldfish in a bowl, and a new fishing pole. Oh, and a doll that says, ‘Goo,’ for your little niece Sue."
The narrator then sums up the shopping spree: "Grand total: three hundred dollars. The perfect present for one and all, for ones who are big and ones who are small. Priceless." Throughout the spot, a lively chamber orchestra score adds magic to the ad.
Composer Robert Miller of RMI, New York, says that his initial version of the score matched the chaotic energy of the character, but then he and the agency changed directions. For the final version, they decided to go "against the rhythm of the film a little bit, and against the chaos, but still maintain a little mischief."
Miller notes that the final version blended the intensity of the ad with the cat’s charm. "It was more about the idea of the enchantment of the spot itself and those beautiful surrealistic colors," he says. "The more lyrical score helped to clean out some of the intensity of the other aspects of the spot."
The chamber group that played the spot’s music numbered about two-dozen players. Miller points out that the score’s principal melody is carried by oboe and bassoon, with an occasional flute added. "It’s reminiscent of the sound you hear a lot in Sergei Prokofiev’s ballet scores," he says. "I thought the sound of the wind solos had a nice charm."
"Robert always goes with a live orchestra," says Mike Boris, music producer at McCann-Erickson. "[The music] breathes, it moves. There’s so much clarity and subtlety that comes through. It’s what we needed with this. The personality of the Cat in the Hat is mischievous. The music really needed to capture that, but the trick was not to make it seem too frenetic because there’s a lot of craziness going on."
Tom Jucarone of Sound Lounge, New York, mixed the densely layered spot. "When I got the spot, I had to assemble the voiceover, work with the editor on some of the sound design, and then mix it all together with the music. Most of the sound design was already prepared by the editor," notes Jucarone. (Editor on the spot was Jun Diaz of MacKenzie Cutler; Healy also provided some sound design.) "But we added a few extra sounds here and there to add to the fun. Obviously, the voice was most important. The music carried the mood of the spot, and the sound effects gave a personality to the cat since we never actually hear the cat speak or see his face."
