Recent sporting events served as the launching pad for the top three on SHOOT’s Fall top 10 music and sound design chart. The number one spot, Nike’s "Horror," broke during the Summer Olympic Games, as did the number two entry, The Volkswagen New Beetle’s "Dreamer."
Meanwhile, the number three chart-topper, Merrill Lynch’s "Digital Bull 2," began airing during the baseball division series, and ran frequently during the World Series as well. Below is a look at how the music and sound design were created for the spots that appear on SHOOT’s Top 10 Chart.
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Number One
An isolated cabin at night. An attractive young woman is in the bathroom, preparing to take a bath. The water is running; she is getting undressed. After she takes off her shirt, she runs a comb through her hair, then opens the medicine cabinet to put the comb away. Closing the mirrored cabinet, she spies a man in a hockey mask, wielding a giant chainsaw. Terrified, she screams and runs; he buzz-saws the cabinet, but she’s out the door in a flash. Rather than opening the door via the knob, he saws through it.
Now the chase is on. He walks quickly after her, chainsaw buzzing all the while; but she moves like a track star, nimbly running through the dark woods, effortlessly leaping over a pile of logs and leaves. Her pursuer, however, is not so agile: Laboriously, he climbs over the detritus—he actually has to place his chainsaw off to the side—and soon is huffing and puffing. The runner eventually zooms out of sight; and the maniac collapses in an exhausted heap, then turns away from the pursuit, presumably to find a less-physically fit victim. A title appears on screen: "Why Sport?" "You’ll live longer." Then the Nike logo and the tag "just do it" appear.
Turns out that the woman is actually Suzy Favor Hamilton, a distance runner who competed in the recent Summer Olympic Games in Sydney. (The ad was part of Nike’s Olympic campaign, which also included "Elephant," directed by Dante Ariola of bicoastal/international Propaganda Films; and "Gladiator," helmed by Tarsem of bicoastal/international @radical. media. NBC pulled "Horror" because of viewer complaints about violence against women, and the inappropriateness of airing the spot during times when young children were likely to be watching TV.)
Directed by Phil Joanou of Villains, bicoastal and Chicago, for Wieden+Kennedy (W+K), Portland, Ore., the slasher flick-style (Friday the 13th/Halloween) :60, entitled "Horror," is both spoof of, and homage to, great scary movies of the past. (The opening shots are almost identical to the beginning of the shower sequence in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho).
The W+K creatives knew that special care needed to be taken with the music and sound design. The spot’s producer, Chris Noble, pushed for Asche & Spencer Music+ Sound Design, Minneapolis, and Venice, Calif. "I had worked with them before and they seemed to do big genre spoofs well," he says, citing as an example Nike’s "Asteroid," a theatrical commercial by the directing collective Traktor of bicoastal/international Partizan, for W+K. "We were looking for a theatrical feel to the horror music," continues Noble. "Phil is a feature director [Entropy, State of Grace], and we wanted to do the genre justice. We wanted to make it as real and spooky as possible."
After being selected, Asche & Spencer began its research. "They wanted a very bombastic, Hollywood-style score," observes Thad Spencer, the company’s creative director. "One that encompassed the Hollywood idiom. So we watched old horror films and new horror films: Psycho, The Shining, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween—the whole spectrum."
Spencer created the sound effects himself by, among other means, using a real chainsaw and slicing through wooden boards. "We spent five or six days creating sounds," he recalls. "It had to have that hyper-real effect, so we’d start with source sound and add a bunch to it. [We combined] fifteen or sixteen sounds to get one. We bought a chainsaw and I ran around waving it in the air recording it, just to get the proper ambience. We had to split every sound out. There were forty different tracks of sound design."
In the meantime, Tommy Barbarella and Danny Stein, two composers with Asche & Spencer—Barbarella is based in the Minneapolis office, while Stein works out of Venice—were handling the scoring chores. Each wrote a separate score in a week, composing from the final cut (necessary because of the precise timings needed). When they were done, the agency decided to take elements from each score and blend them together into one, which was then re-recorded. "We liked parts of each," explains Noble, "so Danny worked on combining the two."
"Everyone was incredibly agreeable," Spencer observes. "It was not a dictatorship, but was very collaborative. They knew we understood the objective, and I think we fulfilled it."
"Ashe & Spencer really nailed it," notes Noble. "You know the horror genre [of music] when you hear it, but to get that sound just right takes great skill."
Number two
The image is a New Volkswagen Beetle caught in the congested streets of a big city. Suddenly, it’s out of the gridlock and zooming among the skyscraper "canyons." And with that switch, the music kicks in: an up-tempo, Gene Krupa-style big-band tune that changes rhythm as rapidly as the changing images. The VW drives onto a palm tree-lined street, becoming a low-rider car, as the music turns vaguely Latin, with a Harry James-like trumpet; then the car swings onto dark desert sand dunes—a very lunar-like landscape—and the music becomes "otherworldly," with a haunting clarinet solo. Just as quickly, the vehicle slams into a muddy mountain road, horns blaring as the beat picks up, until, finally, the Beetle swings into a high-speed racing car competition. The music zings along, too. Then there is a click, followed by silence. The viewer sees—from the Beetle’s point of view—two salesmen in a car dealership. The Volkswagen, which "lives" on a showroom floor, has been asleep and dreaming of what it could be on the outside world.
The spot, "Dreamer," promotes the versatility of the New Volkswagen Beetle, and was directed by Kinka Usher of House of Usher, Santa Monica, for Arnold Communications, Boston. To score the :60, the Arnold creatives knew they needed a special sensibility. "We initially tried playing around [at the agency] with raw sound design and thought, since the Beetle was having a dream, that maybe the music would be a bit odd, eerie, and bizarro," recalls Tim Vaccarino, senior art director at Arnold. "It was interesting, but it did not have the same kind of smiling, toe-tapping effect that we wanted."
The creatives eventually settled on swing music. "The Beetle is like an action figure, so we were looking for a piece with a real lot of energy," explains Vaccarino. "We wanted it to build to a crescendo. With big-band swing, you can jump around musically and have a different musical feel for different parts."
To score it, Arnold sampled a number of reels before turning to bicoastal Elias Associates, a music and sound design house with which the agency had worked successfully in the past on Volkswagen ads. Elias had three in-house composers create different scores, before deciding on a piece by composer Michael Sherwood, who is based in Elias Associates’ Santa Monica office. The composer, whose father is noted big-band musician Bobby Sherwood, notes that "big band tends to be my specialty," but admits that his first stab at a score was off the mark: "The initial version was very different," explains the younger Sherwood. "The agency kept sending back comments. So I scrapped it and started from scratch. I ended up keeping the pulse more consistent. The general feel was to keep the Krupa-esque drums. That worked."
Elias had about two weeks to score the spot. "Arnold had a lot of input," recalls Andy Solomon, the Elias producer on the job, who is based in the company’s New York office. "We were very lucky with them because they’re very collaborative and supportive. We talked a lot."
Sherwood says that creating the score was logistically a bit unusual because he was in Los Angeles and everyone else was on the East Coast, but adds that the set-up did not affect the final results.
For the demo, Sherwood mocked up a temp track, employing a few live musicians along with synthesized music, and that was used for a New York recording session with live musicians and a full orchestra. "We did a big session at the Edison Studios in the Edison Hotel with the best musicians in New York," Solomon reports.
Everyone involved was pleased with the finished piece. "We thought Elias came through for us with exactly what we wanted," says Vaccarino.
"It was fun to work on because a lot of musical badminton was going on," adds Sherwood. "Once we nailed down what they wanted, it was a piece of cake."
Number three
A man sits in a coffee shop located in the empty canyons of Wall Street. It is shadowy, perhaps early morning, and a flock of birds can be heard flying by. The man is reading his paper and sipping coffee when he suddenly looks up. There is the sound of a tremor; the coffee cup on his table shakes. Outside, the wind begins blowing papers, and on the soundtrack, the muted chords have given way to a soprano voice singing, like a lonely angel, as a trail of glowing mists creates indents in the puddles on the street, as though something has run through them.
The scene shifts occur more rapidly now, as the music builds. An assembly line of tiny mechanical bulls comes into view; workers look on dumbstruck, while the spectral presence moves through the factory and the mechanical bulls straighten their heads, then jump off the assembly line’s conveyor belt to follow the apparition. The scene cuts to a field in what could be Brazil or Mexico—men are seen in sombreros, and the music suddenly seems vaguely Latin—and the men look on as the presence pounds across the landscape. As the specter moves through a shop filled with crystal, then onto a stock trading floor, then through the water and across more fields, it begins to assume a recognizable shape: that of a bull.
Through it all, the sound rumbles ominously, then heroically, while the music builds to a majestic crescendo. In the final image, the force materializes, albeit briefly, as a strangely translucent bull, standing on a mountaintop, overlooking the crashing waves of the sea. The music is powerful, inspiring, as the bull disappears again and a bull logo appears, followed by the super: "Be bullish."
Although it may seem like the opening to an episode of The X-Files, the ad is actually "Digital Bull 2," a :60 for Merrill Lynch, directed by Usher, via J. Walter Thompson, New York. The music is by film composer Graeme Revell, out of Groove Addicts, Los Angeles. (Revell has scored films such as Mars: The Red Planet, The Negotiator and Spawn.)
The surreal spot is unusual because it consists entirely of visuals, with no dialogue or voiceover. Consequently, the message has to be carried by the music and sound design. To score "Digital Bull 2," the JWT creatives looked at a number of reels before going with Revell.
"We wanted something fresh and interesting from someone who hadn’t worked in commercials before," explains Eric Steinhauser, senior partner/group creative director at JWT. "We wanted a film kind of feel to it. It starts small and builds, so we wanted a feature kind of feel to capture the emotions and drive the story."
"For emotional impact, you had to have a great piece of music," adds Dain Blair, executive creative director at Groove Addicts.
Although they had not worked with Revell before, the agency was impressed by his speed, and by how quickly he nailed what was needed. "He did a demo that was remarkable," Steinhauser recalls. "We had spent a couple of weeks looking at [the spot] without music, and had talked for hours about what we would like. Graeme put together a demo and we said, ‘That’s pretty much it.’ Music is a funny thing. It’s not a science; it’s an art. Getting the right feel, the right emotion—it’s a combination of a lot of things."
Revell had about two weeks to finish the job and worked from a rough cut, which lacked the computer-generated bull images. (The CGI on the ad was done by Method, Santa Monica.) Francois Blaignan, of Nomad Editing Company, Santa Monica, had already put in the sound of rumbling bull hooves. "The sound design was going to be a lot stronger originally," remembers Revell. "We decided that having the fairly linear rhythm of my music was better than chopping it up to match the sound of the hooves."
Revell employed an eclectic selection of music—using everything from an 18-piece Cantonese choir and "tribal" drums to synthesized percussion and strings—to satisfy the brief. "This was a very global assignment," he says. "We went from France to Brazil to Ireland, and the idea was that this was world music."
From Revell’s point of view, scoring a spot was quite different from composing for a film. "We had a discussion about pacing. It was interesting," he notes. "In feature films, you want to make scenes seem shorter to get through the montage quicker. In this case, we wanted to make it feel longer and make a lasting impression. It was quite a challenge for me. I’d never done that before."
Everyone was quite pleased with the final result. "There was the opportunity for sound design to get out of control," observes Steinhauser. "But there was a beautiful balance, and we let the score tell the story. From the first opening chord, you are riveted. From the first note, you can tell that this is different, this is unique."e
