Melissa Chester grew up in recording studios. Her father is a recording engineer whose work spans advertising, film and records. Her brother is in the business. Her grandfather was a drummer.
As a teenager, Melissa interned at assorted music houses, went on to attain a BA in music, and landed a staff position at David Horowitz Music Associates (DHMA), New York, for a stretch.
She had never contemplated being on the ad agency side of the business until one day when Rani Vaz, the director of music at BBDO New York, came a calling. “Rani reached out to me to produce,” recalled Chester who joined BBDO in 1996 and has been there producing music ever since.
“My world opened up at the agency,” she related. “Instead of just musicians and composers when I was at a music house, I found myself at BBDO also collaborating with art directors, copywriters, animators, directors, editors, licensed music people. The increase in artists who I’ve been able to work with and the high caliber of those people has been a wonderful education and experience, both of which are thankfully ongoing.”
Prompting SHOOT to seek out Chester–who is now VP, executive music producer at BBDO New York–was AT&T’s “Whole New World,” a cinema commercial that earned the number two slot in our current quarterly Top Ten Tracks Chart. Psyop directed this fantastical journey of a fish who is forced to exit the deep blue and winds up finding nirvana above the ocean’s surface. The animation spot was developed for cinema release in 3D and also ran on a limited basis during ESPN’s 3D coverage of The World Cup.
We gained Chester’s reflections on “Whole New World,” as well as on the whole new world that agency music producers have been adapting to in recent years.
SHOOT: Share some backstory on “Whole New World.” How did you decide ultimately on going with composer John Adair of Emoto?
Chester: The backstory is that what makes a great spot possible is a great client. AT&T really cares about the music. It’s a great account for music. We were involved early on in the pre-vis stage, looking at drawings that moved. We realized that this would be an incredible music spot, a cinematic story driven by music. After considering different ways to go, we saw that we needed to record the music live, that we would need a fantastic mix in 5.1 Surround Sound. And we starting thinking about which composers would be good for this special project–a short animation film with no voiceover or dialogue, a short intended primarily for theater audiences.
I spent a lot of time culling down the list of composers I thought would lend themselves to a real filmic score. Included in the list were feature film composers. I started with a list of 10 different companies and composers and started getting demos for a :60, mostly orchestral synthesized pieces. I ultimately got 60 pieces of music which I culled down to 10. Revisions were made as pre-vis got better and more defined. Music was written to accentuate certain scenes. From the 10 pieces, I chose the top five and had people also do a :30. From there we wound up picking the John Adair track. I’ve worked with him and his company many times before for such clients as GE, Visa and Campbell’s Soup. He’s a film composer who has advertising sensibilities.
Ultimately we went to Warner Brothers and recorded live with an orchestra. The live performance gave the spot the warmth and depth we wanted. It was like a Pixar film score with a relatively small orchestra of about 40 players, which is an intimate size that translated into the kind of intimate score we had envisioned. We don’t use many live orchestras anymore so this was a treat, a wonderful experience.
SHOOT: What were the creative challenges you faced on this project?
Chester: We wanted feature film sensibilities for this score. This project required those kind of chops so we stretched our search to cover film composers as well as those who do mostly advertising. We wanted to makes sure we were covered. The score had to have a nice balance. It would have been easy to go too over the top silly, which we were conscious of avoiding. The score had to feel filmic, sophisticated, not reliant on an old grab bag of tricks. Since there was no voiceover, the music was essential and we wanted to get the most out of the orchestral performance so that it just felt right in the context of the story. We were careful in terms of not taking the instrumentation too far so that we could maintain a certain level of class and prestige.
You also have to explore all your options. The challenge with any job is what more can you find out there in the marketplace that doesn’t sound like everything else. We first did a song search for this project. We briefly considered what if we put a song against it or a famous instrumental track. We spent a couple of weeks doing that before deciding that this needed to be scored. We realized in this case that just laying a piece of music on this story would not do it justice. It felt right to go orchestral.
SHOOT: How has your role evolved as an agency music producer?
Chester: Many new avenues have opened up which means that we have to go down as many avenues as possible musically so that no stone is left unturned. That’s what we did for “Whole New World” and what we do for all our work. Do you go with licensed music–an old piece, a new piece? Should there be lyrics?
Record labels are sending us everything as pre-releases. The stigma of recording artists having their work in advertising is long gone. Advertising campaigns offer great exposure for music so we are hearing albums months before they are released. Yet there are so many considerations relative to if music from this source is right for the brand. Is it the right tone? You have to be sensitive to the lyrics and the message they convey.
And the artists run the gamut, from established to brand new bands–from the Stone Temple Pilots new album, to work from a brand new band breaking out of London and scheduled to come out to the U.S. in a few months.
Then there’s all the original music talent out there–composers at commercial houses, feature composers, as reflected in the range of people we considered for “Whole New World.”
And there’s the range of projects as now there are different forms of content beyond the traditional commercial. Short web films, for instance, are a work in progress. The budgets can be tight yet you need to get the best quality. We’re still sorting through the best options for music and sound on this kind of web content. How does a score play across different platforms.
It all begins, though, with an exciting idea no matter what the project. And that’s what we had with “Whole New World.”
