For SHOOT’s spring music and sound design issue, the top three picks point to the significance of a good piece of music accompanying great visuals. With the exception of voiceovers, these three ads are driven solely by their music. Hewlett-Packard presents sound that can be heard and seen, while Mountain Dew engages in a classic cartoon escapade, and Nintendo Gameboy Advance SP attracts moths to the light. Below is a look at how these tracks were created.
Number One
It is an otherworldly yet recognizable place, where sounds can be seen as well as heard: It is the world of the Hewlett-Packard (HP) spot "Bang & Olufsen," out of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners (GS&P), San Francisco, directed by Tim Hope of Passion Pictures, London. (The spot was produced in association with bicoastal Notorious Pictures, Hope’s stateside roost.)
"Bang & Olufsen" depicts live-action people in an animated park setting on an overcast day. The gimmick: When the park’s inhabitants make noises, we can see the sound waves. For example, singing birds are surrounded by circular flashes; an old man’s penny whistle creates rippling waves; a woman’s whispers to her boyfriend show up as a languid, spirally trail; a little boy riding his bike creates curves with his whistle; and a dog’s bark is surrounded by staccato-like waves.
The piece ends with a man in an apartment overlooking it all. He closes his window against the park’s noise, sits down and listens to music from his Bang & Olufsen stereo system. A voiceover says, "Bang & Olufsen relies on HP technology in the production of perfect sound."
The idea for the spot, explains Mike McCommon, the copywriter at GS&P who worked on "Bang & Olufsen," was simple: "How do you visualize sound? If you could actually see sound, would a dog bark look different from a bird whistle? We wanted to play with the art and beauty of sound."
For about 12 weeks, the agency experimented with a number of music and sound design ideas, ranging from no sound at all to white noise to different sorts of music. "We slowed down hip-hop music, making it sound like a jack hammer," recalls McCommon. "We slowed down bird tweets, and they sounded like violins. We tried adding classical music over the whole piece, but it did not work."
The creative team at GS&P worked with various sound designers and musicians in England, Germany, and the United States before deciding to go with stimmüng, Santa Monica. The music/sound design house had previously worked on another HP spot, "Digital Crime Fighting," directed by Fredrik Bond of bicoastal/international Morton Jankel Zander (MJZ). Sound designers Reinhard Denke (who’s also an owner of stimmüng) and Gus Koven were excited by the challenge of the new ad. After two or three phone conversations—the agency and the sound design house never actually met—Denke and Koven set to work.
Each sound designer prepared separate tracks, using analog synthesizers and distortion filters to alter and manipulate actual sounds. "It was like an impressionistic painting," recalls Denke. "Goodby said it would be nice to mix interpretive sounds with realistic sounds. We ended up with a strange hyper-reality. We wanted to enhance the picture, not overwhelm it."
GS&P chose different musical features from each of six versions, combining work done separately by Denke and Koven. "They mixed and matched from the three I produced with the three Reinhard did," explains Koven, who notes that the whole process took about two or three weeks. "Usually, we’re the last to come on board and have very little time to experiment. It was nice to have a commercial centered around our expertise."
Jay Shilliday, the audio mixer at San Francisco-based Crescendo! Studios who mixed "Bang & Olufsen," also found the piece unusual. "It was a very different kind of spot," he notes. "It put me in a different place. Often, I’m trying to create reality. In this case, I was trying to create an abstract painting, more Picasso than Da Vinci. We were not trying to match the ambiance of room tones—it was more abstract. Usually, I’m trying to fix audio rather than make it crazy."
McCommon says the agency was pleased with the final result, and only did minor tweaking. "What they gave us was pretty much what we used," he relates. "They did a great job."
Number Two
Conceived as a tribute to classic cartoons, Mountain Dew’s "Animated," a live-action :60 from BBDO New York and director Samuel Bayer (then at bicoastal Mars Media; now with bicoastal RSA USA), casts a speeding can of Mountain Dew as the Road Runner, and a group of amateur athletes as hapless Wile E. Coyotes, forever frustrated in their quest to capture the can.
The soft drink zooms through the air at a speed so fast that it’s a blur. The action shows, in turn, a mountain biker, an airborne snowboarder, a street luger, and a BMX bike rider all trying to grab the can and—in classic cartoon fashion—getting stomped, crushed, or stretched out of shape (thanks to remarkably fluid CGI done by Method, Santa Monica). An average guy on the street finally stops the can and gives it a squeeze, sending a stream of Mountain Dew into his mouth. The end tag: "Life’s More Animated When You Do The Dew."
Classic cartoons depend on musical cues, and to score "Animated," BBDO turned to longtime collaborator John Adair, a partner/composer at Admusic, Santa Monica, who had worked on many BBDO spots over the past decade. Initially, Adair and other composers spent about four weeks trying out different types of music, mixing hip-hop and electronic rhythms with orchestral scoring. But after a number of attempts, Adair and the agency felt a more traditional approach was called for. Adair then composed everything at a frantic pace, drafting comic ideas and musical riffs in a Thursday-to-Monday stretch.
Cartoon music, Adair notes, is much more complex than it appears to the casual viewer. "It’s hard to take cartoon music seriously, but musically it is the most difficult kind there is," he says. "The writing is very dense, and the players have to be virtuosos to get it right."
It was also a challenge to reference the approach of classic cartoons without actually copying them. One way Adair did that was to "quote" classical music—he employs some of Richard Wagner’s "Flight of the Valkyries" during the scene in which a snowboarder is soaring through the air. "We were poking fun at Wagner," Adair remarks, "and also at the famous surfboarding scene [which used the same music] from Apocalypse Now."
Playing cartoon music is also tricky because it is punctuated by odd slides on the cellos and violins, strange articulations by brass instruments, and wild percussive sounds. "These are musical sounds that might be considered ugly and grotesque on their own, but work perfectly with the picture," Adair says. "They are difficult to achieve since they are not something that is usually taught in college orchestration class."
Adair feels he was lucky to get a talented group of film score musicians—35 in total—who were familiar with such programmatic music challenges. "We had to use a full orchestra," Adair relates. "There was no other way to do it effectively. They don’t have samples for those odd effects. And the music has to be incredibly dynamic to work, and needs a lot of range. You have to have people who can handle the quick tempo changes."
The recording and mixing took place in one day in Los Angeles, and was monitored by the agency via a phone hookup to New York. "I had done an extensive demo project, and used orchestral samples so they could hear how the themes would be, but the funny sounds were not available; I had to talk them through those," relates Adair. "The recording was their first chance to actually hear it, so we wanted everyone to be able to hear it live and make changes as needed."
The score, which was complemented by the sound design of Francois Blaignan of Nomad Editing Co., Santa Monica, involved on-the-set revisions (usually lowering or raising the musical levels to emphasize or de-emphasize effects). The spot took four hours to record, and five hours to mix. "We had a music soundtrack [and sound effects] that could stand on [their] own," explains Tom Jucarone, the audio mixer at Sound Lounge, New York, who worked on the spot. "It was important to figure which is more important at each particular moment to make the comedy work. Sometimes sound, sometimes music, and sometimes silence carries it."
But, unlike the frustrated athletes in "Animated," everyone was satisfied with the process and the product. "It was a magical and wonderful experience," Adair notes.
"The idea was to have a track that scored the action and worked well with the sound design," adds Loren Parkins, VP/executive music producer at BBDO. "We wanted to bring musical excitement to the very cool visuals in the spot. Everyone did a terrific job."
Number Three
"Moth," directed by Dante Ariola of MJZ for Nintendo Gameboy Advance SP, out of Leo Burnett USA, Chicago, features a spare score by PJ Hanke and Damien Heartwell, composers at Spank! Music and Sound Design, which has offices in Santa Monica and Chicago. In "Moth," Hanke relates, "the agency wanted to hear a few different things that exemplified the flight of a moth."
The spot begins with a moth seen flying through the trees. It encounters other moths, whose number keeps multiplying. A glowing white light appears and the moths fly toward it. The light grows stronger and larger, filling the whole screen. Then we see its source: a Gameboy Advance SP floating in midair. The screen goes black and the words "Brilliant" appear, followed by "Gameboy Advance SP."
For the music, the agency turned to Spank!, partly because Hanke had worked with "Moth" copywriter Matt Horton before. "Matt always taps us to come up with things that are unexpected and musically challenging," says Hanke. "This was a standout in that regard. Advertising music without tempo, meter, or key—it was most unusual, very ambient. It shows how far music has gone in advertising."
"We were telling a story with sound, with a sonic environment," adds Heartwell.
Initially, the two composers sat down with the agency creatives and discussed ideas. "Their concepts were not musical," recalls Heartwell. "They first said, ‘We’re thinking it has to have an elegant and simple approach.’ "
The composers tried simple orchestral music, then a combination of electronics and orchestration. "An earlier version was dark, but had strings in a romantic style," notes Hanke. "But it was too strong, too romantic. It gave too much away. The first third of the spot is very stark. We wanted to create a wonderful environment."
The music was ultimately created with the digital manipulation of guitar tones. The team worked closely with Spank! sound designer Tim Gedemer to blend the music with the sound. "It was interesting because the music almost worked as sound design," says Hanke. The team worked on the project for about 10 days, but "it only took a couple of days for the basic concept," he adds.
"The agency gave us space to come up with ideas based on their original concepts," Heartwell notes.
The piece was mixed in three hours at Firehouse Studios, Pasadena, Calif. Gabe Moffat, the mixing engineer, who worked on the spot, was impressed. "The whole music approach was challenging," he says. "You had guitars that didn’t sound like guitars, and treated through filters to sound ethereal. It was more of a strange palette. Usually different elements have clear-cut roles, but here you didn’t have a neat box to put things into. It was really cool. The spot was very evocative and makes you wonder what it’s all about."
