For SHOOT’s Winter Top 10 spot tracks, the top three spots all have one striking characteristic in common: they contain almost no dialogue and are driven mostly by their soundtracks. The Web site eTour, that connects users with sites of interest, used the image of a plane driving through suburbia in "Aviation." The score for the ad is an industrial piece that propels the action, and according to Kevin Roddy, a creative director at Fallon McElligott, New York, it was necessary for the spot to have a strong score. "We felt the music needed to have a driving beat, sort of mechanical," explains Roddy. "It’s a plane and we wanted the music to reflect that."
IBM’s "Supermarket" is accompanied by a playfully sinister piece of techno music, which is underscored by subtle sound design. The spot depicts a man who is presumably shoplifting. The agency and the music house worked on the track for four weeks, experimenting with several styles of music before eventually going with the techno composition. "Shoplifting can look like you’re having a good time, or else it can be dark and sinister—we wanted to skew it more to the fun side," explains Brian Banks, the composer for the spot.
CNET’s "Dance" features a rather awkward couple dancing together to illustrate how CNET. com helps consumers find the right technology products. The spot is backed by a basic and ethereal tune, something the agency felt was necessary for the spot’s success. "We wanted something really, really simple, especially for television, where you see all the ads for dot com companies and they all try so hard to see who can outdo the next company," explains Leagas Delaney copywriter Matt Elhardt. Following is a look at how the music and sound design for the top three was created.
Number One
"Aviation," for eTour directed by Ivan Zacharias of Stink, London, via Fallon McElligott, New York, opens with a shot of an empty, sun-drenched street in Anywhere, U.S.A. As an eerie, electronic reverberation appears on the soundtrack, a car pulls up to a stoplight. The driver looks at his watch, then at the stoplight. Suddenly, he notices something bizarre: there is a propeller plane driving—not flying—behind him. The electronic music increases in tempo and volume. He drives away quickly as the plane continues along the road, in traffic, over a bridge, and, finally, into a suburban subdivision. The craft pulls up to an ordinary house, where a stunned-looking little boy is standing with his father, holding a toy airplane. "Now, the things you like find you," explains the voice-over. "eTour brings you sights that match your interest, so you can search without searching."
The creatives at Fallon McElligott went to bicoastal Elias Associates for the music. "Although the agency had worked with Elias a lot, I never had," explains creative director Kevin Roddy, who was also the copywriter on the spot. "I absolutely loved the experience."
The ad had already been edited by the time it was turned over to Elias composer/sound designer Daniel Hulsizer, and Fallon was fairly certain of what type of music it wanted. "We needed something which had an industrial quality to it," explains Roddy. The piece had no ambient sound—nothing was recorded on location—and Roddy says the agency wanted "something very, very different that would stand out on TV."
"They wanted a sort of strange and science-fictiony sound," recalls Hulsizer. "I work a lot on electronic music, so I was comfortable with that process."
Fallon and Elias representatives held discussions during the process—which took just three days—but, says Roddy, the talks were over minor points. "They had done a really good job from the start. So it simply became a question of noodling things. We wanted music to accent things. … Music played a key role [in the spot]."
"They knew they wanted music to be treated like sound design," adds Hulsizer, who used a variety of synthesizers to craft the soundtrack. "In a sense, the music had to have textures that could be like sound effects within the spot. It’s an off-putting situation and they wanted to convey that feeling. It was textural and works more, in a way, like sound design. It was challenging because they wanted visual cues to be represented by different sounds. So I was always trying to come up with something different but equally interesting."
Number Two
IBM’s "Supermarket," directed by Joe Pytka, of Venice, Calif.-based PYTKA, out of Ogilvy & Mather, New York, features a young, unshaven, longhaired man who appears to be shoplifting. As people and security cameras watch him, he picks items off the shelves, then quickly and surreptitiously stuffs his choices into his trench coat. The image is letter boxed, and the score is a driving techno beat of drum machines and synthesizers.
The punch line comes when the apparent thief goes through an electronic device at the exit. A beep sounds, and a security guard approaches menacingly and says, "Excuse me, sir." The man pauses. Is he caught? "You forgot your receipt," continues the now-smiling guard, as he hands it over to the customer. Then the voice-over explains: "Check out lines. Who needs them? This is the future of e-business. IBM."
"Supermarket" is all about images, so the music and sound design played a crucial role in carrying the story, observes Chris Wall, senior partner/executive creative director at O&M. "I think the spot is quite European because it’s all visual in its story-telling," he notes. "The music style came out of a lot of discussions. We needed something to propel the guy through the supermarket. It had to be vaguely threatening without being over the top."
The agency turned to Brian Banks, chief composer at Ear to Ear, Santa Monica, whom Wall has worked with frequently over the past 15 years. Banks wrote the music and supervised the sound design created by Chris Winston of AudioBanks, Santa Monica. (AudioBanks is the audio post arm of Ear to Ear.) "We all sort of knew they had a really cool spot on hand," says Banks, "and we had a chance this time to play around with it over the course of about four weeks."
Through discussions, Banks and the O&M creatives would come up with various approaches. "We tried a bunch of different things—more dreamy, or guitary—and we kept coming back to what we used," says Wall. "[The alternatives] were actually great as mood pieces, but they just didn’t drive the story. We even flirted with the idea of scoring it with muzak, but it was flat."
"We had experimented with some sort of post-Doors psychedelia, with a late ’90s, early 2000 techno feel, and we tried some really heavy metal," explains Banks. Though the music proves forebodingly innocuous, it’s later revealed that "he’s doing nothing wrong. They are red herring, dark moments. So none of the music was happy-go- lucky."
After the approach was agreed upon, Banks created a demo that was later fleshed out with musicians, and the material was reprocessed electronically to give it an otherworldly feel. There was only minor tweaking at that point, since, says Banks, "We were all on the same page. We were all in sync."
Number Three
"Dance," the CNET spot helmed by the directing collective Traktor of bicoastal/international Partizan, via Leagas Delaney, San Francisco, uses a very simple premise to sell CNET’s prowess at offering the best technology products at the right price. The ad opens with an Asian man in horn-rimmed glasses standing awkwardly next to a red-haired woman. They are in an almost empty, bare-walled yellow room, starkly lit with fluorescent lights, and are wearing white T-shirts with type on them. Hers says "CNET." His says "You." A third man standing on a circular block is then introduced. His T-shirt says "The right tech product at the right price." The woman pushes the Asian man onto the block and the two men start dancing—very stiffly—as the block begins rotating slowly. The music is an ethereal, flute-dominated ballad, a lá Woodstock in the ’60s. The spot ends with the men dancing as a voice-over says: "CNET dot-com. Connecting you with the right technology products at the right price."
The offbeat commercial reflects a warped, "you are here" mentality, and for the score Leagas Delaney turned to Asche & Spencer, which has offices in Minnesota and Venice, Calif. "The director recommended them," explains Matt Elhardt, the copywriter for "Dance." "I had never worked with them before but I knew of them. I had seen their work before and thought it was awesome."
The agency collaborated closely with the music house over a two-week period, with Elhardt frequently listening to what had been composed. "My idea of the music was the kind a youth counselor would be banging out on a guitar," explains creative director Thad Spencer, who composed the track along with composer Chris Beaty. "A really white youth counselor. The guitar was played straight and white, with a deliberate and happy beat."
"We tried all kind of stuff. We even tried weird techno stuff," says Elhardt. "But we wanted something really, really simple." He adds that the music played an integral role because the "dancing had to represent a happy moment."
"The agency was very focused on what it wanted," says Spencer. "We tried whimsical, Captain Kangaroo kinds of things. We even wrote a song with lyrics—’Look at you, look at me, look at together what we can be.’ But we ultimately felt it worked best with the music going and the dancing horribly against tempo. At the end of day, we thought the whole concept was visual."´
