From a feel-good Super Bowl commercial for Coca-Cola in which the ultimate underdog comes out a winner to a Monster spot depicting the despair of Monday morning for a town’s workers–that’s the wide narrative range represented in entries number one and two, which head this Winter’s SHOOT Top Ten Spot Tracks Chart.
Finishing first was Coke’s “It’s Mine,” a Big Game spot that thrusts us into Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade as we see two balloon characters–Underdog and Family Guy’s Stewie–give chase after a Coca-Cola contour bottle balloon only to have a Charlie Brown balloon unexpectedly rise up and take possession of the coveted Real Thing. This charming piece dovetails perfectly with the feel and spirit of the continuing “Coke Side of Life” campaign.
Meanwhile, assuming the number two slot in SHOOT’s quarterly Music Chart was Monster’s “Daybreak,” which takes place in a town during pre-dawn hours. People from all over are waking up and springing out of bed in a panic.
Still in their pajamas, they spill into the streets, grabbing items ranging from suitcases to satellite dishes and running toward a hill. They reach the top of the hill just as the sun is rising and use the items they’ve brought with them as shields against the sun.
The townspeople put up a valiant fight, but they fail to beat back the sun, which rises in the sky, signaling the start of another workweek. “Don’t hate Mondays” appears on the screen as they trudge back home to get ready for work, followed by the Monster logo and the tagline “Your calling is calling,” meaning that there’s a great job out there for everyone and Monster is the means to finding it.
Both “It’s Mine” and “Daybreak” were recent SHOOT “Top Spots of the Week,” with music and sound being key elements towards helping them attain that distinction.
“It’s Mine”
Directed by Nicolai Fuglsig of bicoastal/international MJZ, with visual effects from The Mill, New York, “It’s Mine” unfolds to an inspired score arranged by Robert Miller and to sound design by Gus Koven. Both Miller and Koven are with Santa Monica, Calif.-headquartered stimmung.
For the spot out of Wieden+Kennedy, Portland, Ore., Miller arranged the version of Gioachino Rossini’s robust overture to “The Barber of Saville” and conducted an orchestra comprised mostly of musicians from the Metropolitan Opera of New York. Also included in the ensemble were a couple of musicians from the New York Philharmonic.
“It was [Wieden+Kennedy creative director] Hal Curtis who first had the idea of using the overture,” related Miller. “We had discussions along the lines of whether to go with the bright, energetic mood of the overture or to instead make it something that accompanies these floating balloon characters in a slower paced, lumbering way. The consensus was to go with the inherent energetic tone of the overture, particularly given the audience and the arena–the biggest arena of them all, the Super Bowl.”
However, Miller still had to make some adjustments so that the score would fit the story. “In a sense my challenge was to make a more narrative score out of the overture, breaking it down and putting it back together so that some parts would–at the opportune moments–help to crystallize the idea that the balloon characters are acknowledging each other as well as the Coke bottle. And the score had to advance the notion that these balloons are going to compete in some way.”
Miller also wanted to take advantage of what he regards as powerful “Beethoven-esque aspects” of the overture, bringing them into play when the two initial characters–Stewie and Underdog–are in full bloom in their mid-air competition, hitting the sides of buildings and bouncing off of one another.”
Sound designer Koven experimented with various approaches and sounds, his most evident contribution coming when Stewie and Underdog come together at the Coke bottle balloon. “We went for a good, big bass-ey bump,” related Koven, noting that small lavalier microphones normally used for dialogue were taped to the actual balloons as they bumped against each other and with different objects. These sounds were then taken into Pro Tools and manipulated, resulting in a resonant low-end bumping sound that flowed naturally into the action.
“Overall, what was most important from my perspective was staying out of the way of the story and Robert’s arrangement,” said Koven.
Audio post mixer was Kevin Halpin of Color, New York.
Debut score Also directed by Fuglsig with effects by The Mill, this time for BBDO New York, Monster’s “Daybreak” is both driven and subtly enhanced by a raw and moody track from Cherry-Tate Music Productions, a New York-based company that was formed late last year by Rebecca Cherry and Terressa Tate, who is also a sound designer at Final Cut, New York.
Cherry and Tate served as composers/arrangers, with Tate additionally handling sound design for “Daybreak,” which marks the Cherry-Tate shop’s first job.
In terms of tone, Tate said that she and Cherry didn’t want to go completely dark. “We thought ‘quirky suburban’ going into it, but it still needed an emotional edge,” Tate said, crediting Cherry’s violin playing with capturing the emotion of the spot. “You really start to feel their struggle.”
Interestingly, there isn’t any dialogue in “Daybreak,” and that’s because the spot is running internationally. “To minimize anything being lost in translation we downplayed dialogue and went for big, visual, epic ideas [with all the spots in the campaign],” BBDO art director Chuck Tso explained. This made the soundtrack all the more important, supporting the concept of people who literally don’t want to let the sunshine in.
Cherry-Tate’s track also captured the pivotal moment in which the sun actually appears. An assist, though, goes to the spot’s editor Rick Russell of Final Cut. One of the big decisions to make was whether or not the presence of the sun would take on its own sound effect. “We were possibly looking for a sound that captured the sun, but it was Rick’s suggestion that we build it into the music track–the music could swell at a certain point when the presence of the sun was felt, then we would be killing two birds with one stone,” Tso said. “That was a tremendous insight because we didn’t want this thing to be too layered, too thick.”
Audio post mixer on the job was Tom Jucarone of New York-based Sound Lounge.
