Agency Pereira & O’Dell, San Francisco, and clients Intel and Toshiba had some big shoes to fill with their six-episode online film experience The Power Inside. Earlier this year, Intel/Toshiba’s The Beauty Inside, directed by Drake Doremus of B-Reel, scored three Grand Prix honors—Film, Branded Content & Entertainment, and Cyber—for Pereira & O’Dell at the Cannes International Festival of Creativity. The Beauty Inside, an episodic social film featuring a male protagonist who wakes up as a different person every day before finally falling in love, additionally earned a Cannes Gold Lion for Best Integrated Campaign. Viewers auditioned via web cam to help portray the lead character.
So what can one do for an encore?
Well, Pereira & O’Dell turned to directors Will Speck and Josh Gordon, a seasoned spotmaking duo known for their feature film comedy Blades of Glory. Speck and Gordon—whose ad roost is production house Furlined—brought their distinctive vision to The Power Inside, an atypical tale of a zombie alien invasion starring Harvey Keitel, Craig Roberts, Analeigh Tipton, Reid Ewing and Zack Pearlman. The main character, Neil (played by Roberts), must team with his friends and enlist the help of technology to discover “the power inside” to defeat a race of extraterrestrials who invade in the unlikely form of moustaches and unibrows that appear on innocent earthlings.
The first episode of The Power Inside debuted online (www.insidefilms.com) on August 15—after a trailer had invited fans to audition for the chance to be cast in the film. The subsequent episodes of the film have been rolled out one at a time on a weekly basis.
Multi-faceted score Musically The Power Inside evolved from something relatively modest to an ambitious, multi-faceted score. “At first, the score was supposed to be narrower in focus but as we got more deeply into it and Speck and Gordon and the agency gave us the creative freedom to contribute, it became much bigger and expansive in scope,” related Brent Nichols who recently joined Elias as executive creative director, handed that baton by Jonathan Elias who will continue to be active creatively with the shop. In fact, Jonathan Elias was part of an ensemble of Elias studio composers that worked on The Power Inside, the other composers being Nichols, Michael Fraumeni, Kimo Kemp and Sarah Trevino.
“At first Will and Josh thought less music was the way to go but they came around to embracing more music to keep the story fast paced,” said Nichols. “They wanted the score to advance the story and help to create a youthful cool energy while also conveying emotion. So on one hand we had to produce an epic musical score but with an intimate cool tone. In some respects it’s a mesh of an epic Marvel score with an ethereal kind of Radiohead-ish independent brand of music. We employed big strings and horns for the sweeping epic, emotional feel, mixing in electronic elements and guitar to capture that youthful energy. We pretty much put all hands on deck to pull this off—the huge film score composition being something that’s part of Elias’ DNA. People think of Elias for its classical composition but there are other more modern elements now coming to the fore at the studio.”
Nichols in some respects embodies that contemporary orientation, having come over to Elias after 10 years at Squeak E. Clean Productions, collaborating with composer/producer/DJ Sam Spiegel. As creative director/composer at Squeak E. Clean, Nichols contributed to such lauded work as SciFi Channel’s “Human Suit,” Match.com’s “Piano,” Absolut Vodka’s I’m Here short, and adidas’ “Hello Tomorrow” featuring Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
Key for a project as ambitious as The Power Inside, observed Nichols, was Pereira & O’Dell and Speck and Gordon allowing the Elias coterie of talent to be involved early on. “We got a copy of the initial script, which was only about 20 pages,” recalled Nichols. “We worked together to formulate an idea of what was needed musically.”
And that need was spread across six episodes of The Power Inside, amounting to some 50 minutes. “It’s a feature film-like project and audio is a major part of it,” affirmed Nichols. “Music and sound contributes significantly to the goal of making an immersive film that engages viewers to participate.”
The Elias collective created an original score that showcases a diverse range of genres, from epic string-driven dramatic cues to programming-heavy distortion. The trailer itself starts in with a cinematic orchestral arrangement, then builds into a squall of distorted electronic beats before kicking into a full rock arrangement and back again, all woven together.
While Elias handled the entire musical score for the six episodes of The Power Inside, POP Sound was enlisted to create the sound design which too played an integral role in the project. Sound designers were Rusty Dunn and Chris Pinkston. Peter Rincon served as mixer on the trailer and ADR mixer on the overall project, sharing the latter capacity with Michael Miller. The rest of the POP Sound coterie of talent included supervising sound editor Darren “Sunny” Warkentin, co-supervising sound editor Dunn, re-recording mixer Mark Paterson, sound editors Rincon, Anthony Vanchure and Frank Buckner, dialogue editor Lauren Hadaway, ADR recordists Kyle Krajewski and Stephen Selvaggio, Foley mixers Geordy Sincavage and Leobardo Ledon, Foley artists Vincent Guisetti and Dave DeCoster, and recordist Brian Tarlecki.
