We are taken to a street in the heart of a bustling city, traffic moving forward in the distance, yet there is a curious sight in the middle of the street. A single, solitary ballet dancer is poised to perform as sunlight moves in from right to left to bathe her and her surroundings.
A lower case super appears, evident but unobtrusive. It reads, “the birth of contrast.” The dancer–dressed in a white tutu contrasting against the dark asphalt–then pirouettes, her grace and artistry also in sharp contrast to what can be rough hewn city environs.
The camera next focuses on both of the dancers’ feet extended with heels up, only her toes touching terra firma as they turn on the street, a move setting pigeons in flight around her. As the pigeons take off in slow motion from the street near her feet, the super appears, “the rebirth of detail.”
Our ballerina is then joined by an ensemble of ballet dancers each dressed in vividly colored garb. All the ballerinas’ movements are synchronized as a super reads, “the rebirth of colour.”
One ballerina then takes slo-mo flight herself, leaping over a moving taxi cab.
Assorted dancers leap high, soaring over rows of performing ballerinas whose feet are still touching the street. Together they are a mesh of color, movement and inspired choreography, a sight being captured on and paralleled to a Sony LED television set, billed as the rebirth of LED TV.
Q Department Titled “City,” this spot was directed by Daniel Askill of @radical.media for Tokyo agency Frontage, earning the #1 slot on our fall Top Ten Tracks Chart. The visuals are deftly accompanied and subtly driven by an original music and sound design score crafted by a coterie of talent at Q Department, N.Y.
“The brief was very beautiful, The footage was so majestic. The biggest challenge was to create a piece of music to go hand in hand with this experience,” related Drazen Bosnjak, founder of Q Department and one of that shop’s composers and sound designers on the project.
Bosnjak cited director Askill’s acumen in “shooting at different frame rates. His style and way of expression through shooting at different speeds shows a great understanding of how time ripples when you stretch it out and what you can convey through that. The shots he chose and his use of that technique are so amazing and perfect. We responded with a piece of music that almost feels like a butterfly slowly bouncing from one scene to another. The music feels like rebirth which is the theme, something happening that has taken motion, that is majestic and beautiful.”
The spot opens with an undercurrent of sound design depicting a city, accompanied by some piano. The sound design meshes with the musical arrangement as the bass comes in as substitution for the metropolitan sounds. Bosnjak said the bass taking over has a “wind-in-the-sails effect so to speak, becoming a pushing, pulsing force through which the city sounds are filtered out and the emotional experience of the music and the images takes over.”
Abstract sound design was deployed for the birds taking flight. “We didn’t want to use the real sound of wings flapping because something abstract fits better with the slow motion, the slowness of time,” explained Bosnjak. A realistic sound with action slowed down can be effective but it isn’t as poetic and lyrical as an abstract audio interpretation can be. A stylized abstract sound is more in line with being able to study a particular moment in time.”
Later sound design was augmented during the moment when a ballerina literally flies over the taxi. The transition is a reversal of the intro where sound design gave way to music–except silence plays a stronger role. “We wanted to make that moment special,” said Bosnjak. “One of my favorite things when scoring material in general is to try an inverse or negative hit so to speak. Instead of hitting a moment with sound when something happens, you create a void, an absence of sound. It’s like everybody holding their breath for the resolution–in this case, a dancer leaping over a moving car. And when the music drops out and there’s a silence, we then substitute some sound design, like a sound cloud to give an extra dimension to what we’re seeing.”
In session “City” marked the first time Bosnjak worked with director Askill. “What was really cool is that we had a session with Daniel once we had come up with the approach we had decided to go forward with after having developed several different possible approaches. We worked with him on finessing the track and working on those moments when the action on screen slowed down. I had a lot more sound design in the piece, knowing that we would strip that down. It’s easier to mute things than to be looking for sounds to add in this kind of session. Daniel sat down with us for a couple of hours. We fine-tuned everything together.
“Getting the chance to work with Daniel was really something I welcomed,” continued Bosnjak. “I wish it would happen a little more often. We don’t really get to collaborate with directors that often. It’s great to have the director involved–which is always the case in movies but relatively seldom in commercials. That’s hard for me to understand. If you have the director involved in executing his or her creative vision to its end point, it can be of great help. It can be a very positive creative collaboration.”
Askill had originally gone with a scratch track to which the spot was cut. It was a piece of established, eclectic music, said Bosnjak, that Askill had fallen in love with and contemplated putting on his director’s cut. “The best compliment for us at Q Department was that Daniel decided not to go with that on his reel because he liked our original music which was completely different from what he had before.”
Askill and the Q Department ensemble worked with a Frontage creative team that included creative director Hideo Tanaka, art director Junji Fujimori and producer Yoshiyuki Suzuki.
Editor was Brad Turner of MassMarket, New York, which also served as visual effects house.
Colorist was Tim Masick of Company 3, New York.
Audio post mixer was Glen Landrum of Sound Lounge, New York.
