1) We had a very exciting (and challenging) project hit our doorstep this year for the Lincoln Motor Company together with Hudson Rouge/NY. Not only was it a big artist collaboration with Gary Clarke Jr., which gave us the opportunity to produce, record and mix with him, but they wanted us to do something that had never really been done before. Build a guitar amp out of Lincoln car parts. I mean, how often does a project like that come along?? Of course we had never done anything like this, but between our managing director/EP Marlene Bartos and Grammy Award-winning EP/mixer Gerard Smerek we were able to connect the dots and create the coolest Lincoln guitar amp I have ever seen (or heard). We had a lot of long days/nights/weekends/holidays throughout the process and in the end it was a complete success. Not only that, but it was a Grammy Awards project with multiple legs (TV commercials, making of films, behind the scenes, online content and live performances). We were presented with many challenges on this one from logistics to feasibility. In the end our teams banded together and dug in deep. That’s what made this one really fun to work on.
2) We have had a few of those this year with two that were particularly memorable. I guess I cannot deny the fact that we won a Gold Lion in Cannes this year for a little project we took on with MullenLowe/Singapore and director James Teh. We have worked with James on a few projects and he had a really fun one for us (with not a lot of money). But because of that I think we got to have more creative freedom and compose a mix of music and sound design that we were all very passionate about. The product was Clear (a dandruff shampoo) for the Asian market and all based on the Japanese interpretive dance form called Butoh developed after WWII. Coincidentally our composer and NY creative director, Mike Dragovic, had studied this art form in college and was able to bring a lot to the table. He teamed up with our NY sound designer Weston and the two embarked on a wild journey of sound creation. The end product turned out to be very fruitful.
The other project that was a really fun one was a 4D animated film we worked on for Chimelong Parks in Guangzhou, China. We partnered with Prana Studios to score and orchestrate this 12minute fully immersive film that took us to Mumbai, India to work on a Dolby Atmos mix. Our mixer, Scott Gatteño’s first time working on the Atmos platform and at one of the premier Bollywood mix studios in Mumbai. It’s a film full of pandas on wild adventures, fireworks and evil rabbits. You can’t get much better than that! Just one of those fun projects that you can be really proud of in the end.
3) It’s really been a fun and interesting evolution here. We were always a traditional music and sound design company that started out in Detroit. Our first step in growth was really physical expansion, which started in New York and spread to LA and Hamburg. We were able to cover more of the world this way with key directors in each location to help spread the word. This has proven very effective for us and gave us the chance to take the next leap which was diversification. 10 years ago we branched out into the worlds of experiential audio design and themed entertainment which gave us the opportunity to work around the world in places like Dubai, Singapore, Seoul, and Mumbai for projects with Ferrari World, Universal Studios, One World Observatory, and Fox. With these projects we were doing more and more full audio production from the music and sound design down to the studio mix and onsite mixing. Since mixing is something we are really good at, we opened up a sister company in our NY space called VINYLmix dedicated to audio post mixing and lead by our mixer Weston Fonger. And from there we jumped heavily into the VR/AR world of spacial audio. For us, the idea of evolution is something that is necessary to grow our business. We have to continuously adapt to the changing landscape. That’s what makes this industry so exciting. What do I like least about this? Really the only thing might be the travel as it takes me away from my family a lot (but as most people know, I do have a real passion for travel too). There is no way we could have grown our business the way we have without my brother and business partner Michael Yessian who keeps me in check, our mentor and father Dan Yessian who started Yessian Music 46 years ago and our amazing staff of 30+ people around the world that help us achieve success.
4) One of the biggest trends I see this year is increasing speeds at which we are creating content. The time crunches have always been there, for years really. But with evolving technologies, the creative is being pushed out faster and faster. We have learned to adapt and speed up our process for a long time. The unfortunate part for the audio is it is often times coming in at the very end of the project timeline. Many times with only a couple days to complete it. Our most successful projects this year have been the ones where we are brought in earlier in the production process. Those projects where we are actual partners on the film and maybe even influencing decisions made based on what sound can bring to the table. One thing we have learned is to never overstep our bounds when it comes to the overall creative production process, but when everyone on the project is involved from the start, the end product will be elevated. I encourage (and challenge) our industry to partner more often with audio vendors and involve them from the very beginning.
5) Our teams at Yessian Music are fully immersed in the VR/AR world now. We have been researching, experimenting, developing and implementing for nearly two years in the spatial audio frontier led by Jeff Dittenber and Scott Gatteño. With the work we have been doing in experiential and themed entertainment the last 10 years, we have developed a skill set in creating audio for environments with multiple audio channel formats from large spaces to interactive moving rides. We’ve been able to take this knowledge and apply it to the VR/AR world in headphones. The learning curves take some getting used to. It’s like the Wild West out there. The various platforms are not really in sync with each other at all, so creating an ambisonic mix for the Samsung Gear is completely different from the HTC Vive. We’ve had the opportunity to work on some pretty ground breaking VR projects for the likes of Cisco, Ford and Volvo most recently that gave us the chance to really push the boundaries with spatial audio and hone our skills even more. With each new project we work on, we are presented with new challenges and take away new found knowledge. That’s the beauty of working on this platform, we are always learning.
