Talk about variety. SHOOT’s fall Top 10 chart is graced with an eclectic mix of music styles. In the number one position is a refined piano track that is hauntingly beautiful in its sheer simplicity. Coming in at number two is a soaring, grand score with a filmic quality to it. Rounding out the list as number three is a quirky reggae tune. Read on for the full story of how agency creatives and composers—and in one case, a hands-on director with a particular love of music—combined their talents to create standout tracks.
"Catch"
Sometimes less is more. Take the music that accompanies AT&T Long Distance’s "Catch." The elegant piano-centered track composed by David Horowitz, president of New York-based David Horowitz Music Associates (DHMA), demonstrates the power of simplicity.
Done via Young & Rubicam (Y&R), New York, the spot—animated by Michael Dudok de Wit of Acme Filmworks, Hollywood, whose Father and Daughter won an Oscar this year for Best Animated Short Film—centers on a father and son playing catch. As the boy grows, the game continues, with father and son moving farther and farther apart. Ultimately the boy turns into a man, and he throws the ball so far his father can’t catch it. As the ball sails over the father’s head, he reaches for a phone to call his now-adult son. We see that despite the distance between them, the two are able to keep in touch because of AT&T Long Distance. The spot ends with a series of graphics: "Stay Connected," "AT&T Long Distance" and, finally, "AT&T Boundless."
It was important to the team at Y&R, which included senior partner/executive music producer Peter Greco, that the music support the delicate animation rather than overpower it. It also had to be poignant. "It had to touch you emotionally," Greco relates. "But it couldn’t be weepy."
After listening to demos from various music companies, the agency chose Horowitz’s submission. "David and I have a wonderful long-term relationship, and we collaborate really well," says Greco. "He understands what we need as an agency, and I know what he’s going to give us. He has great intuition."
Horowitz says the music came easily to him because the concept of the spot hit home. "My son just graduated from college last year, and he’s moved out to Minneapolis to start his own life," explains the composer. "So it was something very close to me."
There is no dialogue or narration in "Catch", therefore, the music had to supply all of the emotional cues, Horowitz points out. "One tends to approach the composition of music for a spot differently when there is dialogue and when there isn’t," he notes. "When there’s a lot of copy, you’re usually very aware of the fact that you have to stay out of the way. So there is immediately a limit on what you can do in terms of emotional range. When there’s no copy, it’s wide open."
While Horowitz’ track may be low key and quiet, "it has created a lot of noise," states Greco. "It really cut through the clutter. [David] says more with two notes than most people say with fifty."
"Launch"
Epic, grand and stirring: That was the kind of track the creatives at Saatchi & Saatchi LA Torrance, Calif., wanted to accompany "Launch," a high-profile spot for the redesigned Toyota Camry, which was directed by Phil Joanou of bicoastal Villains. And they knew exactly whom to call: composer Robert Miller of Amber Music, New York and London.
"He is amazing. I’d been watching his work for a while, and when that Mercedes-Benz ‘Modern Ark’ spot came out, which Miller composed, that put him over the top for the creatives," says Damon Webster, the agency’s director of advertising production. ("Modern Ark" was done via Merkley Newman Harty & Partners, New York, and directed by Gerard de Thame of bicoastal HSI Productions and London-based Gerard de Thame Films.)
Miller went to town for Saatchi, scoring a sweeping, passionate piece of music with a traditional symphonic sense. The music sounds like a lush film score—which is only fitting given the movie-quality nature of the spot. "Launch" opens on a city street in the evening. Cut to a close-up shot of a man staring at a television screen in the window of a store. He sees shots of an astronaut floating in space. The imagery is amazing, but he becomes mesmerized when the screen flickers, static buzzes and images of a car appear. Underneath the car, it says, "You Want It."
Cut to a harbor in an Asian country. A woman and her two children are in a boat watching a cartoon on television. Again the transmission is interrupted, static is heard and the car appears. The little boy looks at his sister to see if she saw what he did: From the way she looks back, it is clear that she did.
The commercial moves on to New York’s Times Square, where people are stunned to see the car pop up on one of the large-screen TVs. In what appears to be Italy, people are watching a movie outdoors. They, too, see the car. A girl looking at a television behind the counter of a sushi joint sees the car, and it even appears on a giant screen at a soccer game.
The spot ends with the original man we saw staring at the television in the store window. He turns and sees the car he saw on TV, parked on the street. He walks over to inspect it and is in awe. The spot ends with the tag line, "Reinvented Camry. Trust Us. You’re Going To Want One."
While the imagery evokes emotion, so does the music, rising into a crescendo and quietly settling down toward the end of the spot. Miller says the music was a priority to Joanou, whose film credits include U2: Rattle and Hum. "He’s an absolutely passionate music lover. I’ve worked and scored a lot of big directors’ stuff, and I have never encountered anybody as immediately passionate about the music as he," states Miller.
Joanou communicated frequently with Miller via phone during the production process. "He let me create, but he was clear about what he wanted and that made it easy for me," Miller reports.
Meanwhile, Miller was collaborating closely with Bill Chesley, a sound designer at Amber. "One of the big challenges was trying to get stuff to poke through Robert’s score," Chesley says, noting that much of the sound design is subtle. Interestingly, the most difficult element to create was the static that is heard whenever the image on the television screens flickers and turns to the car. "The static was fairly hard to pull off. You didn’t want to just blast in there with television static," explains Chesley. Ultimately, he decided not to use static, but recordings of voices which he manipulated using ProTools and other devices.
For Miller, the capstone of the project was the recording process. "We went to the best scoring stage in the whole country: the Sony lot scoring stage. It’s the most magnificent-sounding, -looking and -equipped place I’ve ever been in my life," he enthuses.
Joanou even attended the session—not exactly a common move for a director. "I loved that he was there," says Miller. "For as hands-on as he was, at the session he said, ‘This is your gig. This is your composition. I’m here to approve things but also to enjoy the session. Go do your thing.’"
The client was so impressed with the music, according to Webster, that they agreed to allow the agency to cut a :60 version—a :30 was originally planned. "There were so many poignant moments throughout that spot," Webster recounts, "and when you put them with the dramatic music, there was no way people could turn away."
"White Man Dancing"
When humor in commercials comes to mind, it usually involves clever dialogue and wacky actors. But music can also tickle the funny bone, as evidenced by the playful reggae tune composed by Fluid, New York, for the Red Stripe beer ad "White Man Dancing."
The spot, out of BBDO New York, finds the Red Stripe spokesman—a jovial Jamaican gentleman—grooving to a mellow reggae tune in what looks like an island bar. A white man stands nearby, watching the spokesman dance. The Red Stripe guy hands the onlooker a Red Stripe beer, and the rhythmically challenged guy also starts dancing. "Red Stripe and reggae, helping our white friends dance for over seventy years!" the spokesman bellows. "Red Stripe, it’s beer! Red beer!" The spot ends with a close-up shot of Red Stripe beer with a graphic of the tag line, "Hooray, beer," underneath.
For the team at BBDO, "It was important to keep the music loose to enhance the comedic sense of the spot," explains Elise Greiche, senior producer at the shop.
"They wanted the tune to be proud, but funny," says Fluid’s executive producer, David Shapiro, who produced and co-composed the track with colleagues Steve Walsh and Andrew Sherman. "They weren’t looking for Bob Marley’s ‘Get Up Stand Up.’ "
The agency also didn’t want slick production values. "We wanted a loose feel, like it came off an old reggae record," Greiche reports.
The first version that Fluid recorded didn’t quite have enough of a sense of humor, according to Shapiro, who says he, Walsh and Sherman—who all played on the recording—got it right during a Saturday afternoon jam session. "Maybe we had a couple beers or something," he recalls, tongue planted firmly in cheek. "We did, I think, and we were a little looser.
"The agency wanted us to play purposely, but not too professionally," continues Shapiro. And that was more easily said than done—especially given the fact that these guys are used to having to hit every note. So while recording the track, Shapiro and his fellow musicians actually had to make a concerted effort to play with less precision, as if they were performing a live concert. "When you see an artist perform live, sometimes it is the mistakes that make the show interesting, different than the studio recording," he points out.
The tune the Fluid team came up with for "White Man Dancing" is certainly catchy, and watching the commercial, you can almost envision a band made up of guys in Hawaiian-print tee-shirts, cranking out the music in the corner. "All of us have done gigs like that," Shapiro recounts.
Guitar, bass, drums and keyboards are featured on the track. Shapiro notes that Sherman, who played keyboards, used a vintage organ from the 1970s that helped give the tune a quirky, unique sound.
In the end, composing and playing the music for the Red Stripe spot turned out to be a great deal of fun, concludes Shapiro. The team at Fluid enjoys working on funny ads. "We have a sense of humor about advertising in general," he says. "It ought not to take itself too seriously."
