For SHOOT’s summer music and sound design Special Report, the top three picks effortlessly blend sound and image. Tomandandy and Machine Head create an eerie track for a flightless bird, while Endless Noise turns the dry cleaners into a musical masterpiece. And Fluid helps Cingular Wireless take on New York City. Below is a look at how these chart-toppers were created.
NUMBER ONE
Scene: a deserted, mountainous landscape. A beat-up car rides into the picture, piloted by a twentysomething man. His voiceover, delivered in a creepy film noir monotone, explains the situation: "Driving down the road I spot a dead emu. Having just lost my girlfriend, I decide it might look nice mounted in my poolroom." The spot cuts to an image of the emu mounted on a wall. After collecting the bird, the story becomes stranger, as the voiceover continues: "I quickly become paranoid he’s not dead. Not at all." Suddenly, the emu comes to life and begins attacking him. "I was a touch worried," deadpans the birdman. The car swerves out of control—there is a quick image of the driver’s head mounted on the wall—and crashes into a roadside building. "I awoke in a pool hall, frequented by a local sorority, and I ask you: is this a coincidence or part of something bigger?" The man is surrounded by buxom young coeds, all wearing T-shirts emblazoned with their sorority logo: EMU. A brief image of the famous Lee Jeans spokedoll, Buddy Lee, flickers on the bar’s TV set. The last shot is a quick zoom in on the driver’s jeans, which feature a Buddy Lee jeans logo.
The :30, for Lee Jeans, and entitled "Emu," was directed by Dante Ariola of bicoastal/international Morton Jankel Zander, out of Fallon Minneapolis. The spot is engrossingly weird—and made even weirder by the odd musical score, part-Twilight Zone, part-rock ‘n’ roll. The music is the work of bicoastal tomandandy, with sound design by Machine Head, Venice, Calif.
After reviewing a number of music company reels, the Fallon team opted to go with tomandandy, who had previously scored a United Airlines spot out of the agency. The team met with Tom Hajdu, the creative director of tomandandy’s Santa Monica office, to show him a rough edit of the spot. "It was cool," he recalls. "It was like a road movie compressed into thirty seconds; there was a lot of stuff going on. It was very narrative and yet very nonlinear. The music had to be programmatic to some extent to support the narrative but also had to be a hybrid of orchestral music and contemporary music." The resulting track was composed by tomandandy composer Ed Ma, and produced by Pegi Murray.
The agency, adds Hajdu, "knew where they wanted to be stylistically, and knew where they wanted to be going." The Fallon team spotted sections for music, sections for eerie silence, and sections for eerie sound design, which was created by Stephen Dewey, owner/creative director at Machine Head, with Chris Simpson acting as assistant sound designer. "For EMU the first thing we did was create a large number of voices for the emu itself," explains Dewey. "These were then whittled down to the one you hear in the track. We used human performance, squeaky toys, talked to bird song enthusiasts, recorded our pets and synched up recordings of other creatures. … Having achieved that, we created the Lee Dungarees signature sound element at the end. Lastly we then assembled the rest of the storytelling elements, the fight, car crash, strange ambience in the room et cetera, with a view to creating an atmosphere of alienation and dreaminess."
The agency was pleased with the initial work from tomanandy. "They did odd things to instruments, playing them backwards to give a unique sound," recalls Eric Cosper, the art director on "Emu" at Fallon. "That sound carried you through the spot but didn’t take over the spot. It was not intended as a music-driven spot. We were trying to use the music to create more of an ambiance and a mood."
Things went fairly smoothly in the two weeks of scoring by five people from both the east and west coast offices of the music house. "Tomandandy was very flexible," observes Cosper. "They did a number of different versions. Some of the original problems were with the mix between the sound design and the music. We went back and forth between tomandandy and Machine Head. We didn’t want the music to step on the sounds of the emu screeching or the sounds of the car crashing." For instance, they tried versions of one section with trumpet and then with drums, finally choosing the latter because the trumpet sound blended too much with the screeching.
In the end, everyone was satisfied. Says Hajdu: "There was quite a bit of information in a short time. The whole thing jumps out at you. I said to them at the time, ‘I wish I could see a whole movie done in this style.’ It’s striking."
"Tomandandy really gave us an eclectic, interesting sound," adds Cosper. "We asked them to provide something equally interesting to hear as the spot was to watch. The music did enhance the creative by putting viewers in an eerie mood. There was actually a time when we thought, ‘Maybe we won’t have music.’ But when we heard the music, it worked so well. It puts you in the right mindset."
NUMBER TWO
The United States Postal Service spot, "Dry Cleaners," which promotes direct mail coupons, features a collection of noises that individually mean nothing, but in juxtaposition create a symphony of sounds which cleverly illustrate the point of the :30.
The commercial, out of Leo Burnett USA, Chicago, and directed by John Dolan of bicoastal Anonymous Content, opens on a shot of a small dry cleaners. A customer walks in; a bell on the door rings. She presents a coupon for 40 percent off on her dry cleaning, and gets her clothing. The man behind the counter, presumably the shop’s owner, twirls the automated clothes rack, which clicks into place. The bell chimes for another customer, also carrying a coupon. The steam press is heard. The bell again. Now the cash register—soon a rhythm develops as the different sounds and images are played off against each other, high and low, fast and slow, literally becoming music to the ears. At spot’s end, a voiceover states: "Target your customers with direct mail, and you may actually hear your business grow. Music to your ears, brought to you by the United States Postal Service."
The spot’s soundtrack didn’t start out as a harmonious blending of sounds from a dry cleaners. Originally, according to Jeff Elmassian, president/creative director of Endless Noise, Los Angeles, the piece was supposed to segue from the sounds of the dry cleaners into a music piece by a jazz combo. Elmassian, who had worked with Leo Burnett most recently on a Nintendo spot, was brought in during pre-production and began recording sounds to be used in the finished spot.
Getting involved in the pre-production, which Elmassian says he is doing more and more, simplifies the process. "I say to clients, ‘If you want sound effects to work with the picture, talk to me ahead of time,’ " he explains. "Otherwise, my hands are more tied."
When Dolan returned from the shoot, he had shot a few machines at the dry cleaners which hadn’t been storyboarded. Elmassian, along with composer Andy Rehfeldt, began crafting new sounds to match the images. The agency, Dolan, and Elmassian soon agreed that the piece should evoke the feeling of music but not involve any actual musical instruments.
"It was challenging," says Elmassian of the sound designing process. "I had to go out and find sounds that worked rhythmically and record them and then play them back like musical instruments."
One new item, for instance, was a series of vibrating wires. Dolan hoped to give the feel of a bass; but an actual bass didn’t give the right sound nor did the machine, which was high-pitched and whiny. Elmassian ultimately found what was wanted by recording garage door coils.
"After the shoot, there was a lot of back and forth between us and Endless Noise," recalls Bob Davis, senior producer at Leo Burnett. "In the editorial process, you end up changing the cut, and you adjust the picture and the sounds."
Everyone was pleased with the collaboration and the final result. "We were looking for something that would build into a crescendo, and be more rhythm than melody," notes Davis. "The guiding point was to create music from the sounds you see or hear at the dry cleaners. Jeff is very bright and brought a lot to the party. It was a good collaborative relationship."
NUMBER THREE
A fleet of New York City taxis fills the screen, driving in what could have been a circular dance line as choreographed by Busby Berkeley for one of his musicals. The sounds of the driving cars are punctuated by pulsating street sounds, by honking horns—done in unison—and by two moments where all the cabs open and close a door at the same time. It soon becomes clear that the grinding wheels and honking horns are playing a tune—"New York New York." It is an extraordinary rendition. They are last seen in an overhead shot, driving in different circles to form the logo of Cingular Wireless.
The computer-generated cars doing a "dance" routine are seen in Cingular Wireless’ "Taxi Dance," out of BBDO New York, and directed by Alex Weil, executive creative director of Charlex New York. The musical sounds were created by Fluid, also in New York.
The premise, explains Melissa Chester, music producer at BBDO, started as a one-sentence concept: "New York New York" done on cab horns. But, she adds: "We were up in the air as to how to do it because no one had ever done that before." Chester and her team turned to Brad Stratton and Andrew Sherman, two of Fluid, with whom she had worked before. (Sherman is partner/composer at Fluid, while Stratton is senior producer.) "We thought the idea was great," recalls Sherman. "We were just concerned with the fact that it was only supposed to be car horns. Later, it was expanded to include other sounds."
The group sat down with Weil who showed them, via storyboards and toy taxicabs, the general movement of the visuals. Stratton and Sherman then used a DAT player to record honking cab horns and other street sounds for use in the piece. "We paid cabbies a dollar a honk to honk their horns for us," relates Sherman.
Within seven days, and based on a temp track produced by Fluid, Weil had created images to play with. Over the next eight weeks, the animators, composers, and agency producers worked to review, revise, and revamp their original vision. The spot eventually evolved to include sounds playing the song other than car horns—the only point that stayed consistent from beginning to end was the openings and closings of the car doors. "We thought there should be more car sounds, more horns, more rhythm," says Chester. "We moved through many different styles before we were satisfied."
That meant, recalls Stratton, that Fluid had to "find dump trucks, jack hammers, and other industrial city sounds to work in rhythm and in melody."
"The chemistry of the cabs was designed in the spirit of the old Busby Berkeley musical numbers," notes Weil. "Fluid and the agency creatives gave birth to a unique new sound. My job was to make sure that it all worked to picture."
The team was working right up until the final airdate, and was ultimately quite satisfied with the end result. "Everyone was great. They were an absolute pleasure to work with," observes Chester. "I think of it more as a music piece than a sound design piece. It has more of a musical rhythm. What’s great is you don’t hear the melody right away and that every time you listen to it, you can hear something new. The spot was a wonderful experience."
"The big challenge was in the creative process," adds Sherman. "There were limitless possibilities."
