When TBWA/Chiat/Day, Los Angeles, was charged with spreading the word about the limited edition Nissan Sentra SE-R/Spec V, the agency decided on a novel approach. It created a CD-ROM featuring a short film called Master of the Sixth Speed, which is the product of several top animation and visual effects companies, along with original music and sound design, and licensed tracks. The car is meant to appeal to the so-called tuner crowd—you know, those guys with their hats on backward in low-riding, souped-up cars with dark glass, chrome wheels and booming sub-woofers shaking the back windows.
Master of the Sixth Speed will be distributed in the spring issues of automotive, hip-hop and other urban magazines. From the get-go, the creative team at TBWA/Chiat/Day knew that if the music weren’t right, the project just wouldn’t make it. "Music is integral to Nissan’s overall strategy," says Rob Schwartz, executive creative director at TBWA/Chiat/ Day. "The mission for the entire campaign—the spiritual mission—was authenticity." In the short itself, that authenticity was an embrace of the Japanimé animation style known as Manga, as executed by Vinton Studios, Portland, Ore., and Celluloid Studios and Rhythm & Hues Studios, both in Los Angeles. (Vinton Studios recently acquired Celluloid, which is now relocating to Portland.) Prior to closing, MTV Commercials was involved in the preliminary stages of production on the film.
Adding to the Japanimé style, engineering and design data were included on the CD. The creatives asked themselves, "What do tuners, the target audience, do with their cars?" "They race them," Schwartz responds, "so we got the engineering piece to the puzzle. They talk about them, so we got this great mythic Japanimation. What else do they do? They listen to music in their cars. That’s a given. The day the first guy put a radio in a car was a magic moment."
The short film has very little dialogue, relying on music to drive the action forward. Master of the Sixth Speed centers on a hero—Shadow Agent—in an SE-R Spec V who is attempting to retrieve a disk stolen from the headquarters of Nissan research-and-development. As the hero chases after the thief, called Viko, the car is shown in full action.
The Right Tunes
It was imperative that the soundtrack for Master of the Sixth Speed be authentic. The agency creatives sought out tuners in garages and parking lots and searched tuner Web sites, which usually have a "favorite driving music" section. "We wanted to create music that was not only authentic to the movie, but resonant and relevant and authentic to the target," Schwartz says. "The whole marketing effort was holistic. It wasn’t just, ‘It’s a young audience; throw in some young music.’ Some car ads do that. For us it was a much deeper mission, to be true to the target in every sense."
To that end, the Nissan team called in bicoastal Elias Arts. "We knew these guys could help us find music that was authentic to the target, and compose it. And if they couldn’t compose it, [they could] find the people who either had the music or could compose it."
Thus began a three-month process that started out more like that of a movie soundtrack than of commercial music. "We said, ‘Here’s the idea for this movie and here’s the rough cut. What do you guys think?’ " recalls Schwartz. "The mission is, be authentic to the film, make sure you get the right emotions in the film, and at the same time be authentic to the target."
The composers at Elias, used to writing soundtracks for 30-second spots on tight deadlines, jumped at the chance to score a full four-minute movie that was virtually nonstop music and action. Elias composer David Wittman relates how a number of different composers went to work, each independently scoring the entire video. "Then we presented stuff and talked about what was really working," he explains. "Maybe one guy had the right idea for a certain section and someone else had the right idea for another." The demos the creatives liked were from Wittman and two other Elias composers: Danny Hulsizer and Jimmy Haun. "We were able to get those together, and the three of us started working in one session together," says Wittman. "That’s where we came up with the final track."
The end product was an amalgam of the three composers’ work, with Wittman’s demo scoring the beginning of the video. "It had the sparseness, but picked up the energy," he says. "In the later scene, called the flashback sequence, Danny’s demo really broke down nicely and created a cool texture and mood. And when the chase starts, Jimmy’s track kicked in the hardest and had the best energy. We went through like that and comped together the different takes into what makes sense."
Wittman is a little reluctant to put a label on the musical style of the soundtrack because the meanings of terms change so quickly, but he’s comfortable with calling it techno. "We drew on a bunch of different electronic styles," he points out. "The tempo and style of some of the stuff, like the front end and the chase scene, could be described as being more derivative of drum and bass, that style of music out of England. My track is skewed in that direction."
A pleasant change from spot work was the long lead time the composers from Elias had to produce the track: from November 2001 to mid-January. "We got a chance to really dig in and have fun," says Wittman. "A TV commercial—sometimes you sort of hit it and quit it. [This project was] not one where you bring in a musical idea, give it one variation and then tie it up at the end. It was like doing a mini-movie."
Back in September ’01, before Elias was called into the project, the first elements of the soundtrack were being pulled together at stimmüng, Santa Monica, Calif., by sound designer Gus Koven. With only storyboards for guidance, he and his crew took a Nissan SE-R/Spec V and digital recording equipment up to the Willow Springs race track, located north of Los Angeles, to get the sound of the car being pushed to the limit.
"We spent a lot of time getting the right car sound, driving the hell out of the car," explains Koven. "It’s a pretty exhaustive process where you try to get a microphone—and sometimes the best mics are big mics—that’s good for a particular sound into a crevice of the car. So we spent a lot of time clamping mics into various parts of the car. We drove it around a racetrack and stopped and adjusted the mics slightly. We’d maybe like a part of one sound and a part of another. It was a long, hot day."
The long lead time gave Koven time to experiment with the car sounds, using guitars, synthesizers and compressors to get the most dramatic renditions. "It was basically how to take this landscape that the spot is set in and make it as wild and cool as possible," he says. "We used all kinds of techniques of manipulating the sound and mixing environmental sounds in. I have this old EMS synthesizer that has this jet-like fiery sound. We used that and mixed that in with the car sound when it’s really going to give it a little bit more. It adds another dimension."
While stimmüng and Elias were creating their scores, they swapped work back and forth to get a feel for what each was bringing to the pro-theject, and the team from TBWA/ Chiat/Day—Schwartz, creative director Chris Graves, art director Bill Hornstein and copywriter Michael Collato—provided further direction. "The creatives laid it out for us: ‘This is where we really want the music to drive it, and this is where we want the sound to drive it.’ Sometimes that would change as we were working, but we generally had a pretty good idea of where each other’s space was," Koven observes. "Rhythm & Hues would send over new cuts and everyone would conform to them. The process was very lengthy because it took so long for the visuals to happen. It gave us a lot of time to play around with stuff and really dial it in."
The challenge for Koven was that the video’s length was longer than that of a conventional car spot. "The hard part was making sure you are working from the same palette, but without using the same sounds over and over again, and making sure it evolves over four minutes," he says. "The whole animé thing is about it being hyper-real. You’re taking it to a whole other level. It’s bigger and cooler and more tactile and vibrant than what’s actually happening on the screen."
To round out the CD-ROM, TBWA/Chiat/Day added another half-hour of music playable through stereo systems. It includes the video’s soundtrack, a six-minute remix by D.J. Hive, the three compositions that went into the soundtrack—"Viko’s Theme" by Wittman, "The Mission" by Hulsizer, and "The Master’s Way" by Haun—and two licensed tracks: "Shaolin Satellite" by Thievery Corporation and "Electron Gun" by Electrostatic. All the music is cleared for airplay and some cuts are reportedly being aired on Los Angeles radio. Any TV use is less likely. "We’ve had some requests from the dealers to maybe do a spot, but for the moment we want a campaign that’s a discovery campaign," states Schwartz. "We don’t really want to come out there and say, ‘Here’s our new tuner car.’ We want these guys to discover the car."
Schwartz says the project is the first of its kind—"a movie on CD that also sold some stuff"—but it probably won’t be the last. "We built this spot to have a sequel if need be, and there has certainly been some interest," he reports. "From the get-go, we’ve believed it could be an ongoing thing."
