The top three music and sound design tracks on SHOOT’s winter top 10 chart all take a minimalist approach—orchestras and rock bands are nowhere to be heard. Bicoastal tomandandy created a drum-based track for Nike Apparel; Volkswagen uses a spare, electronic cacophony from New York-based composer Joshua Ralph; and rounding out the top three is bicoastal Elias Arts, which created a sedate, but mysterious track with an ethereal vocal for Infiniti.
NUMBER ONE
Listen to the pounding timpani drums in Nike’s "Pull Up" with your eyes closed. The soundtrack to the spot, done via Wieden+ Kennedy (W+K), Portland, Ore., could well serve as the backdrop for an old-style shootout scene from a classic Hollywood western. Instead, the spot—directed by Rupert Sanders of Omaha Pictures, Santa Monica—features a modern-day duel: a full-tilt pull up contest taking place on a crossbeam under an elevated subway overpass in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, N.Y.
As the timpani roll, the spot opens on two young guys sizing each other up—each looks as if he has just stepped out of a boxing gym after two years of nonstop training. Just before the action starts, we’re treated to a shot of a mother herding her children indoors for the duration of the duel.
The contest is moved along by the steady dum … dum dum pulse of the timpani. Otherwise, there is silence. The crowd below the overpass can be seen (but not heard) cheering wildly as the two men do pull up after pull up. Finally, one of the men falters, and he sends his opponent a defeated look. The vanquished man drops from the overpass as a final drum pulse seals his doom. The spot closes with a graphic end tag for Nike Apparel.
"The cool thing about this job is that it didn’t start out simple; it started out huge," notes Bob Giammarco of audioEngine, New York, who served as the spot’s audio mixer. "I had over sixty tracks to work with at first."
Andy Milburn, creative director at tomandandy, notes that the company’s "early work on the spot was just epic, big sound design. We actually scored a lot of material to the boards and not the film because the agency got us involved early."
When Milburn looked at the film and plugged in tomandandy’s initial track, he realized that the track wasn’t doing much to enhance the picture. "Sometimes you add sound design and the picture just gets huge," relates Milburn. "But we did that here, and it seemed to stay about the same size."
Milburn and Jason Menkes, executive producer at tomandandy, then went back to the drawing board, and eventually brought in freelance composer Brian Bauers, whom they knew could build a track quickly and effectively. "Plus he had a great timpani sample," laughs Milburn. "Those are harder to come by than you think."
Once it became apparent the heavy sound design approach wasn’t working, Monica Taylor, the W+K art director on "Pull Up," encouraged tomandandy to backtrack. "Originally, the sound of the subway rushing overhead was really important to us," says Taylor. "It was going to blot out all the crowd noise at first, and then the sound of the crowd was going to build to a roar. But when we saw that wasn’t working, we asked for some different approaches."
Taylor relates that tomandandy brought back several new tracks to consider, and she and her team listened to each one. The last offering they heard was the timpani track. "We knew that one was going to be it," says Taylor.
Giammarco credits Nike with the flexibility to realize that the spot would gain from less sound: "The client was very impressive in their willingness to explore something new that didn’t go where they originally thought it was going to go," relates Giammarco. "I don’t mind that in the end it seems like the track was really simple. It came out great, and it doesn’t matter that we muted forty effects tracks to get there."
NUMER TWO
Rather disorienting during its first 25 seconds, "Squares"—done via Arnold Worldwide, Boston, and directed by Malcolm Venville of bicoastal Anonymous Content for the Volkswagen Beetle—shapes up to be simple, yet hypnotic. As the spot begins, we hear only the ticking of a clock as the first shot (a square clock) appears. Then the music track starts. First, we hear only a simple electronic melody of alternating fifth octaves as different images of square objects appear successively in montage form.
The speed of the montage increases—a square green sponge, a fish tank and a bar code all flash across the screen. As the images become more frenzied, so too, does the music. An entirely different electronic melody joins in, then a drum track. By the time the spot nears completion, square images are flashing by at a rate of more than two frames a second. The music has become frenzied—cacophonous even. Finally, the montage resolves itself in a shot of a VW Beetle: automobile design’s equivalent of the anti-square. Once the Beetle appears, the track likewise resolves in a single, guitar-tinged note.
In choosing music for "Squares," Tim Gillingham, the Arnold copywriter on the spot, admits that he and his colleagues were initially at a bit of a loss. "The spot itself is not a traditional Volkswagen [ad]," he notes, "We wanted the music to complement the abstractness of the spot, yet not get in the way of the visuals. ‘Kubrickesque’ and ‘dissonant’ were words we bandied about in trying to describe what we wanted."
According to Gillingham, composer Joshua Ralph immediately grasped what the agency was looking for and composed six different tracks in rapid fashion. Ralph, a young New York University film school graduate, records under the band name Spy. His debut album, Music To Mausner By, has won widespread critical acclaim. The composer was unavailable for comment at press time.
"Josh is an agency favorite," relates Gillingham, "He did the music for Jetta’s ‘Big Day’ last year and everyone was quite impressed. He gave us exactly what we wanted for ‘Squares.’ "
The spot’s mixer, Mike Secher of Soundtrack Studios, Boston, relates that his main job was to make sure Ralph’s sonic chaos built up and then resolved itself properly. "We couldn’t come in too soft, because it could get lost … but we didn’t want to start too loud so the music could have room to build," explains Secher. "Basically, I made sure the levels were right, and beyond that, I just explored a few different variations of what the composer had already presented. It was just a matter of making a few certain elements louder or softer to get the desired effect."
NUMBER THREE
Infiniti’s "Long Time Dreaming"—created by TBWA/Chiat/Day, Los Angeles—arguably features the most traditional soundtrack among the top three. However, the mysterious, even languorous track manages a unique, memorable style. The spot itself features a car-loving gentleman sent into a reverie by the sight of a passing Infiniti.
Directed by rad-ish—a.k.a. Moritz Friedel and Christoph Chrudimak—of bicoastal Go Film, "Long Time Dreaming" opens on a shot of a suit-clad professional. A red Infiniti passes him by in slow motion, and the man turns to admire the car. Confronted with such fine engineering, the man begins to remember his love affair with automobiles—in reverse. His first flashback is to a racetrack, where he watches souped-up machines race by a checkered flag. Then, he remembers buying his first car. Next, he’s pretending to drive his parents’ car with his younger sister. Next, he’s racing toy cars. Finally, we see the man as a toddler, peering over a back seat. The spot concludes when the man snaps out of his memories and notices that a young boy across the street is also admiring the Infiniti: "The new Infiniti G35 coup. When did it begin for you?" a voiceover concludes.
The flashback sequence was shot in slow motion and "rewind mode" (everything moves backwards in the scenes). The soundtrack, composed by David Wittman of Elias, features a mellow palate of percussion, bass and guitars, topped by a single female voice. The singer improvises over the musical base with ethereal vowel sounds, lending a sense of wonder. John Bolen, who mixed the spot for Eleven, Santa Monica, remembers that the voice track made it possible for "the spot to really match up the picture and the music. It was perfect in terms of making the memory experience on screen seem credible," says Bolen, who adds that mixing the spot was a pleasure.
"Two styles we knew we didn’t want for this spot was, first, any kind of backwards sounding music, and second, obviously nostalgic music," relates Tor Myhren, creative director/copywriter at TBWA/Chiat/Day. "In telling Elias what we were looking for, we asked for a sort of ‘haunted lullaby.’ "
While thinking about the haunted lullaby guideline, Wittman immediately realized that vocalist Liz Constantine—a frequent Elias freelancer—would be perfect for the job. "We brought her in to get something dreamy and ethereal," relates Wittman. "It was later at night and we were working against the clock. We pulled up the spot and lit some candles just to get everyone in the right state." Wittman says he took between 30 and 40 takes of Constantine improvising in that candlelit setting, eventually achieving the sound heard in the final, languid cut.
