Talk about variety. SHOOT’s top three music and sound design tracks represent a wide range of styles and sounds. Nike’s "Freestyle" pumps up a hip-hop jam featuring noises from the basketball court. Mercedes-Benz’s "Modern Ark" offers an impressive orchestral score peppered with world music, and Kinko’s’ "Nightmare" delivers a suspenseful soundtrack worthy of any Hollywood horror film—it sends chills up the spine. Read on to learn how agency creatives and music house composers and sound designers collaborated to produce these ear-catching tracks.
Number One
When the creative team at Weiden+Kennedy (W+K), Portland, Ore., needed someone to create a complex track made up entirely of basketball sounds for Nike’s "Freestyle," directed by Paul Hunter of bicoastal HSI Productions, they called on Jeff Elmassian, composer/ producer at Endless Noise (formerly digihearit?), Los Angeles. "The [agency creatives] just came to me, and they said, "We have no idea if this is going to work. Are you interested in just giving it a go?’ " Elmassian recalls. He knew it was going to be a challenge, but he was game.
The spot, which was choreographed by Savion Glover of Broadway’s Bring in ‘da Noise, Bring in ‘da Funk fame, finds various basketball players showing off their moves on a set with a black background and a shiny silver floor. Each player dances and dribbles his way through a routine set to a track co-composed and co-produced by Elmassian, legendary hip-hop artist Afrika Bambaataa, and Steven Brown of Breakthru Productions, New York. The composition was inspired by the beat of Bambaataa’s "Planet Rock."
Creating the track was a complex process. Elmassian and Bambaataa each wrote a track that the players did their moves to on the set. Once the film was shot, Elmassain sat down with editor Adam Pertofsky of Rock Paper Scissors, Los Angeles, to find out which moves worked with which grooves. Afterward, Elmassian went back and polished the combined track, reworking specific elements for specific moves.
The basketball sounds were obtained from Elmassian’s music library. He also recorded the players at the shoot and other basketball player buddies of his own. "[W+K creative director/art director] Hal Curtis was vigilant about wanting everything to be a sound created on a basketball court," Elmassian states. "You could not stray from that at all."
"When you think about it, there are a lot of sounds from the game that are very percussive and even musical," notes Curtis. "A squeak of a sneaker can have a musical sound to it. There was a lot to work with [in terms of creating a soundtrack]."
The toughest part of the job was syncing the sounds to the moves of the players. That’s why Curtis says it was important to involve Elmassian in the process as early as possible. "Actually, we involved the editor, the director and the sound guy from the very beginning, and they all worked together because it was like a jigsaw puzzle," Curtis explains. "We wanted to be very sure that from the beginning everyone was on the same page in terms of the rhythm of what we were doing, because it affected everything."
Elmassian is proud of the finished product, noting it is truly a piece of art. And you can dance to it too. "I’ve been to clubs, and there are DJs who have gotten their hands on the track and you hear it in their mix," he says. Elmassian doesn’t mind his work being sampled? "Are you kidding? I love it!"
NUMBER TWO
Robert Miller, a composer at Amber Music, which has offices in New York and London, knew that the score he composed for Mercedes-Benz’s "Modern Ark" struck a chord with TV viewers when he was bombarded with e-mails from them. "We started getting e-mails from all over the country from people wondering what film this music was from," reports Miller. "That doesn’t happen every day."
Created by Merkley Newman Harty (MNH), New York, and directed by Gerard de Thame via bicoastal HSI Productions and London-based Gerard de Thame Films, the commercial poses the question, "What would you bring if you were loading the Ark today?" The answer is revealed as a variety of animals, including giraffes and elephants, board a modern version of the Ark. Then people are viewed bringing treasured works of art, including Van Gogh’s "Sunflowers," as well as musical instruments, such as a Steinway piano, aboard. Also present on the new Ark are Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, an iMac computer and a freezer filled with Häagen-Dazs ice cream. The last items on the Ark: a Mercedes-Benz E430 and an E-wagon.
The spot is visually stunning, and the music grand and moving. Miller describes it as an orchestral score with world colors. "It’s all orchestra basically, but this particular piece has some interesting flavorings that come from places other than traditional orchestral instruments," he says. "There’s the ethnic wood flute, and there is a unique-sounding great bass recorder. A really good friend of mine is a world-renowned frame drummer—those are Middle Eastern hand-held drums—and he played those on the track."
Sivan Ben-Horin, the art director on the ad from MNH, says the music, which was recorded live in a studio, was crucial to the spot’s success. "There’s no dialogue in this commercial, so it’s not like the music is just an underlying layer. It had to have a storytelling feel to it," she explains. "It needed to be big and cinematic, but not pompous and arrogant. And it needed to be friendly, but not ad-like and tacky. And it needed to feel Old World, but it also needed to feel New World, because you didn’t want it to feel biblical. The spot is a twist on biblical, so it had to have something that was more ethnic, otherworld-like, but without being too specific to a place—but then you didn’t want it to be from nowhere. It had to have a distinct flavor. So, it was hard to navigate."
Miller says the spot was cut to a temp track that helped define what the creative team was looking for musically, but he wound up departing from it. "I just took the ball and ran with it and surprised Sivan a bit with what I had given back to her," he recounts.
Ben-Horin was happily surprised. "When I heard the track, I was like, ‘Wow, I can’t believe this. I kept asking, ‘Was it an epiphany? What happened? What did you eat this morning?’ " she recalls, laughing.
The composer says he simply followed his gut. "You have to throw yourself into a job, take some chances and be willing to write a score that you think is great but that will possibly be rejected," observes Miller. "I think it’s important as a composer to not just accept a job and not just accept what people are telling you at face value, [but] to try to meet the needs of the job so that everybody’s happy," he says. "You have to go a little further."
NUMBER THREE
It’s only fitting that Kinko’s’ "Nightmare" premiered during the recent Academy Awards ceremony. The ad has a cinematic look and sound not usually found in spots. Think The Twilight Zone meets Alfred Hitchcock.
The commercial, directed by Tom Routson of bicoastal Tool of North America, casts Ryan Stiles, of The Drew Carey Show and Whose Line Is It Anyway, as a super-dedicated Kinko’s employee. The commercial begins with him sleeping in bed, clad in PJs with the copy center’s logo. As Kenny tosses and turns, the viewer is drawn into his mind, where Kenny is in the midst of a black-and-white nightmare that finds him wandering a deserted street on a dreary, rainy day. No one is around, and it’s eerily quiet. Everywhere he looks, the Kinko’s guy sees drab signs advertising bake sales, art festivals and bargains. All of the signs are in tiny type on plain, letter-sized paper. He is startled by a flock of pigeons that flies at him, and a desperate man who is running down the street screaming something about his company needing 500 training manuals by tomorrow. The Kinko’s man finally sees a hint of color when he spots a reassuring photo of a little girl in a store window. When he walks up to take a closer look, her eyes suddenly pop open, scaring him, and revealing a nasty case of red eye. Shocked by the dull and scary world he has wandered into, the Kinko’s man yells, "Doesn’t anyone know all the things Kinko’s can do?!" A separate voiceover plugs Kinko’s digital photo centers.
The accompanying orchestral score punctuates the action. Composer Christopher Kemp, who works out of the Santa Monica office of bicoastal Elias Associates, scored the piece. "I think it’s cinematic. I think it’s eerie, and I think it’s scary," he says of the ad.
And that’s exactly what Mila Davis, the spot’s producer at TBWA/ Chiat/Day, Los Angeles, and the rest of her creative team were looking for. "We didn’t have dialogue until near the very end, so the music was extremely crucial," she relates. "Even though the visuals were cinematic and beautiful, you had to have the sting of the music to run chills through people."
Funnily enough, Kemp spent some of his time composing the scary score on a little keyboard belonging to his girlfriend’s son. "It was basically written on a Casio," he laughs.
For her part, Davis enjoyed working with Kemp and his team—which included Jonathan Elias, creative director of the shop, and sound designer Daniel Hulsizer—because they were so accommodating and easy to work with. "We actually talked to them before they had a rough cut, then showed them the rough cut, and we went back and forth for a few weeks," she says.
Time was of the essence. "We had a tight finishing schedule because we were trying to get the spot on during the Academy Awards," explains Davis.
Given the movie quality of the music, perhaps Kemp will one day score a film. "I’ve always liked thrillers and dramas, so maybe someday," he muses. r
