High caliber audio mixing elevates a spot to creative heights it couldn’t have attained otherwise. That’s not conjecture but a statement of fact as reflected in an assessment by then Association of Music Producers’ president Jan Horowitz during last year’s AMP Awards for Excellence in TV Commercial Mixing.
“A lot of expertise goes into making a great television commercial, and the sound mix is the critical last step,” related Horowitz of New York-based music/sound design house David Horowitz Music Associates. “Pulling all the audio elements–the music, dialogue, voiceover and sound effects–into perfect balance supports both the visual image and the advertiser’s message. That’s what the very best postproduction mixers do, and we think they deserve recognition.”
SHOOT takes a look at several mixers behind select entries on the Fall Top 10 Spot Tracks Chart. We lead off with Rob DiFondi of Sound Lounge, New York, who served as sound designer and mixer on the number one entry in the current SHOOT Chart: Burger King’s “Eat Like Snake” for Crispin Porter+Bogusky, Miami.
In the spot, a man takes on snake-like qualities when he sees someone leave his Burger King Triple Whopper unattended for a few moments on a cafeteria table. The reptilian guy slithers belly down on the ground and under tables to reach his burger prey and then opens his hinged jaw to devour the Whopper in a single bite.
“As a mixer, you had to resist the basic instinct to make things loud,” says DiFondi. “Up front this spot had to be sparse in terms of sound so that you set the stage for the crazy track that Beacon Street Studios did. To have that track blast through from a sparse audio beginning gives it and the spot all the more impact. I didn’t want to take over the spot with sound before that track started. There had to be no giveaway as to what the track had in store..just some ambient room noise, subtle footsteps and the rustling of a [burger] wrapper.”
From sound design and audio mixing standpoints, the challenge entailed DiFondi being presented with an MOS spot that he had to work on from scratch. There was no sync sound recording on the commercial he received, which was originally shot for Korean television but then adapted for an American version. “I kept everything from an audio perspective very mundane–the guys in the cafeteria, some footsteps, everything you’d expect to hear.” And once the offbeat nature of the story was revealed, DiFondi supported it with such sounds as the snake-like man’s clothing rustling as he slithered along the floor.
Then there was the fine line of making the burger appetizing while having the man engulf it with his mouth like a ravenous reptile. “I went with some sticky-eating, saliva-sounding noises as the man’s jaw unhinges to accommodate the size of the burger,” says DiFondi. “The sounds had to be realistic to the story while not too gross so as to make the burger unappealing.”
DiFondi has known but one professional home in his career–Sound Lounge–which he joined as an assistant in ’99 right out of State University of New York College at Fredonia. In January ’01, he was promoted to full-fledged mixer, leading to assorted credits, including a recent Cadillac campaign out of Modernista!, Boston, for which he earlier did Hummer’s notable “The Big Race.” Other credits include VW spots featuring the “Fast” character, AmEx starring and directed by M. Night Shyamalan and Burger King’s “Manthem” commercial; the latter was a mixing collaboration between DiFondi and Sound Lounge mainstay Philip Loeb.
Of Sound Lounge, DiFondi simply says, “This place has been so welcoming from the very first day. I can’t imagine myself anywhere else. I was given the opportunity here to learn, to work and grow.”
Tom Goldblatt
Veteran mixer Tom Goldblatt became an entrepreneur some four years ago when he partnered in the formation of audioEngine, New York, which has since sprouted a Phoenix shop as well. He mixed the number two entry on the latest SHOOT Tracks Chart, Sharp Aquos’ “Lost Ball” from Wieden+Kennedy, New York. The spot features Guiseppe Verdi’s Caro Nome aria from the opera Rigoletto. The midi orchestration from arranger Raymond Loewy of tonefarmer, New York, lends an apropos tone and feel for the storyline, which has a professional golfer, his caddie, tournament officials and live spectators searching to no avail for a golf ball which was shot errantly into the rough. Meanwhile those people at home or looking at a retail storefront telecast of the tourney on an Aquos TV set can clearly and easily see the ball in its hiding place.
While the mixing proposition on “Lost Ball” was “pretty straight forward,” says Goldblatt, “it still required quite a bit of attention. “Strings can tend to take over the track if you let it. You have to be careful with strings, trumpets and instruments that are in the range of the human voice. You want them to be prominent but they can swallow your track if you’re not careful. You want to hear the low parts and not have the large swells in the way.”
Goldblatt loves music and mixing. And he has come to embrace the alluded to entrepreneurship that affords him some creative freedom. “It gives you ‘the illusion of control’ by being an owner of a company. But most importantly it enables me to get into different types of projects. A big sound design gig might take me away from my day-to-day mixing for a week or two. Now I can choose to try to do that if the work interests me–commercials, documentaries, an independent film, an editor’s special project.”
He recalls working on a fund-raising presentation piece for China Cares, a grassroots charity designed to help young girls in adoption centers in China who weren’t receiving needed medical care. “Years ago as a staff mixer somewhere it would have been hard to free up the time and get the permission to work on that project. But here [at audioEngine] I can and it’s the kind of gratifying project that helps you bring more to all your work.”
Jeff Fuller December will mark three years for mixer Jeff Fuller at Eleven Sound, Santa Monica. Among his latest endeavors was Hyundai Sante Fe’s “Drumline” for The Richards Group, Dallas, a CG spot in which factory robots go about their business in choreographed fashion to music and sound design from Primal Scream, West Los Angeles. The procession of sci-fi-style robots gives way to the Santa Fe, with a voiceover that says, “362 highly skilled robots–one well crafted vehicle.” The spot finished in the number three slot in SHOOT’s Fall Chart.
While the spot presented no daunting technical challenges from Fuller’s perspective, he was able to add some fine touches. He did, for example, some filtering of the drums to let sound effects help underscore the precision movements of the robots. In one sequence, a robot takes two giant steps, which Fuller accentuates with large crash-like sounds as a creative contrast to the audio pacing in the rest of the piece.
Fuller started out doing dubs at Rex Recording & Video Post, a small Portland, Ore.-based facility, in ’96. A year later, he was thrown into the mixing fray, working on projects for Wieden+Kennedy, Portland.
In ’98, Fuller relocated to Southern California “to escape the rain,” landing at West Los Angeles-based BBP as a mixer. After a couple of years there, he went freelance, primarily to work on his favorite show, Futurama, created by The Simpsons’ Matt Groening. Then Fuller found his current roost, Eleven, connecting with its owner/mixer Jeff Payne. Fuller’s career has since blossomed, with him mixing for example the Burger King “Whopperettes” spot that debuted during the Super Bowl, most of the new HP spots in which we never see celebs’ faces (such as Jay-Z) as they tell us what’s in their computers, making the PC “personal” again, and the lauded Tiger Woods’ Nike commercial “Kid Tiger.” Fuller affirms that a key contributor to his success is his assistant Luis Rosario, “who’s always there for me and has got me covered.”
