In SHOOT’s summer music and sound design special report, the top three chart picks illustrate the importance of music and sound to an ad’s success. "Trailer," for the new Volkswagen Touareg SUV, features a subtle score that complements the visuals, while Samsonite’s "Human Nature" has a soundtrack that also blends perfectly with the picture. And Yahoo!’s "Subway" mixes music and sound in a way that makes it appear almost normal for commuters to carry around huge Internet search bars.
Number One
A young woman with short blonde hair gestures to an off-screen car and driver. "Just a little closer," she says. Then a Volkswagen Beetle hooks onto a motor home, and with a grinding noise, promptly jack-knifes up and off the ground, its front wheels in the air. "This was a good idea," says the woman sarcastically. The same action is repeated with the new Volkswagen Touareg SUV and everything goes smoothly, as an announcer explains: "Why did Car and Driver name it best luxury SUV for 2003? Could be the 7,700 pounds of towing capacity. Touareg—the Volkswagen that does what other Volkswagens don’t."
The spot, "Trailer," for Volkswagen’s Touareg, directed by Michael Haussman of bicoastal Person Films, out of Arnold Worldwide, Boston, employs subtle musical scoring—a light, playful riff, and effective sound design—to make its self-mocking point: Not all Volkswagens are created equal.
For the music and sound design, Arnold senior VP/executive producer Paul Shannon turned to partner/ composer Jeremy Adelman at Music For Picture, New York, and Michael Secher at Soundtrack Recording Studios, Boston, who created the sound design and audio mix. Adelman has worked with the creatives at Arnold over the last two years on a number of Volkswagen spots, and also on a 15-minute promo to run at car shows, which "had a lot of jazz music," according to the composer.
Adelman, who saw a rough cut of "Trailer," was asked to compose a piece that would "comment on the story without drawing too much attention to itself. Stylistically, I was trying to be in a place that wasn’t identifiable," he says. "But it was definitely comedy music without being slapstick."
Over a two-day period, Adelman composed five demos for "Trailer" and the two other spots in the campaign—on the latter two, he worked with Peter DuCharme, also a partner/composer at Music For Picture. For "Trailer," Adelman used synthesized percussion, vibraphone and bass, and played the live guitar parts. After the music was approved, live bass replaced the synthesized music. "Replacing the synthesizer definitely changes the performance we get," Adelman notes.
"We had a whole lot of freedom," he adds, citing Music For Picture’s long relationship with Arnold and Volkswagen. "They didn’t try and pigeonhole us. What was challenging was that the story was placed outdoors, so we had a lot of ambient sound effects. It was difficult to write music that was coherent through the sound design."
Adelman did not work on the mix or the sound design; both were handled by Soundtrack Recording Studios, another frequent collaborator with Arnold. Sound designer/ mixer Secher took the demo version of the music as his reference track and "went in and layered every sound, from desert wind and the engine noises to the tire hiss when he jams the brakes on. The big sound was the Volkswagen going up and the trailer hitting the ground." For that, Secher utilized 15 to 20 different elements, including a car crash, a chain creaking, heavy springs moving, and a car being crushed at a junkyard.
The mix went smoothly, says Secher, although "there were some dialogue issues [because a line was changed]. I had to edit it so that it looked like she was saying what she seemed to be saying."
In the end, everyone was very pleased. "They gave us what we were looking for," notes Shannon. "It was not about the music. It was a very visual story, and we didn’t want the music to get in the way, but to complement it. They nailed it."
Number Two
Playful, funky music—a series of tuneful stops and starts—perfectly complements Samsonite’s "Human Nature," directed by the team of Richard Overall and Simon McQuoid of bicoastal Go Film for TBWA/Chiat/Day, New York. The :30 features a series of images that illustrate the on-screen tag: "It’s human nature to test things"—a swimmer putting her toe in the water, a hand touching an iron, a man smelling milk, a foot kicking tires. The spot ends with the tag: "We just take it further than others." The last image is of a Samsonite knapsack being put through a durability test.
To create the music and sound design, TBWA/Chiat/Day tapped Jeff Elmassian, creative director and composer/sound designer at Endless Noise, Los Angeles, on the basis of his reel. "They wanted a distinctive piece of sound," recalls Elmassian. "They wanted to walk the line between sound design/effects and music." Also working on the spot were Endless Noise composers/ sound designers Andy Rehfeldt and Jeremy Zuckerman.
The team at TBWA/Chiat/Day initially wanted the piece to be more sound-driven. "We had an idea of a sound effects-driven musical track," says Nathy Aviram, senior producer at TBWA/Chiat/Day, "and we liked what [Endless Noise] had done with a Nike spot [‘Freestyle,’ directed by Paul Hunter of bicoastal HSI Productions for Wieden+Kennedy, Portland, Ore.], which just featured the sound of a ball dribbling."
"The more we talked, the more we thought it would be music-driven with sound effects fitting in around the music," notes Elmassian. "Then it was a question of finding the right palette of sounds, which was the most important thing."
Elmassian put down the music to a rough edit. The editing was then altered to fit the rhythms of the music. "With no dialogue, ‘Human Nature’ is the music driving the edit," he says. "It is easiest to change the editing to fit the music. In the beginning, for instance, we had three quick edits, and in order for all the sounds to work and have the greatest impact, you have to cut rhythmically with the tempo. If the edit is locked in, then I’m stuck having to speed up or slow down the music, which gives it less impact. It was a choice. You have to conform to the music because you want to do it, not because you have to do it. It’s a symbiotic process."
Endless Noise also did extensive sound design, although Elmassian says he doesn’t make a distinction between that and music. "We had to decide whether there would be complete sound design or just one sound for each scene," he explains, adding that they went with the latter. "We said it’s not necessary to have complete sound design, and, anyway, the important thing in this piece was how the sound serves the music." The quirky tune employed a ukulele, a hammer dulcimer, microphone feedback sounds, drum loops, a mandolin, a guitar, and a piano.
Elmassian conferred with the agency creatives frequently—about five or six times a day—but never in person. "I am the poster child for East-West Internet collaborations," he says, noting that everything was done with FTP files and DSL lines. "They’d want a change and we could do it and have it across the country in five minutes."
"We’d throw out ideas, and they would throw out ideas until we’d find the right sound," recalls Aviram. "There were found sounds and real sound. It was a process of elimination."
Eighty percent of the musical work was done in the first three demos; after that it was fine-tuning. (Rob Sayers handled the final mix at Sound Lounge, New York.) Nonetheless, the job was fairly time-consuming. It took two-and-a-half weeks, and 20 or 30 demos to get it right. But, says Elmassian, it was worth the extra effort, because "we felt the commercial was something special."
Number Three
The first image is intriguing: two people riding an escalator down to a subway platform, each carrying an unwieldy, four-foot-long sign under their arms. Each sign has a different phrase: "Résumé tips" on one, "Low carb diets" on the other.
The subway is filled with the normal hustle and bustle of people catching their trains, except each commuter also has a sign under his or her arm, with its own phrase: "Cell phone rates," "Crab cake recipes," and so on. A train pulls in and people board it. We see a man coming down the stairs, calmly but quickly; he holds open the closing doors with his sign, "NYC subway schedules," and gets on the train. Another passenger notices his sign and nods approvingly. A voiceover then explains the bizarre world: "The new Yahoo! search. Faster. Easier. Bingo."
The spot, called "Subway," was directed by David Frankham of bicoastal Smuggler for Black Rocket Euro RSCG, San Francisco, as part of the "Search Bars" campaign for Yahoo!. Its musical track is noteworthy: a beautiful piano-dominated piece, which reflects the calm of the protagonist who gets to the train on time. Still, it wasn’t always planned that way, according to Andy Newell, owner/lead composer/sound designer at ripe sound, San Francisco, who was tapped for the job. "They originally wanted to use licensed music," he says.
"We had stuff with lyrics, everything from Ethel Merman to Sonny and Cher," adds Steve Stone, creative director at Black Rocket. Newell, who has worked on Yahoo! ads out of the agency for the last five years, recalls being brought in before the shoot and giving the producers two pieces of advice: Use an original score and shoot it without sound. "There was no dialogue, and I told them nothing in a subway was so unique that we couldn’t re-record it and get it better in the studio," he says. "It was partly a financial question."
The sound design was subtle, Newell says, because the effects had to sound real. He went down into a subway station and recorded almost all the effects, from people shuffling to train doors closing. Individual footsteps were recorded in a studio session. "Matching the feet—especially when you can’t even see them—is tough," the composer notes. "We built all the sounds from the ground up."
Newell then composed "calm, peaceful music as a counterpoint to the motion going on. It clicked immediately," he recalls. "I wanted something peaceful to reflect that the people had their search bars with them."
It took two weeks to compose the music and do the sound design for the five spots in the campaign, and Newell talked with the agency "every day, five times a day." For "Subway," he recorded "maybe two or three versions, [because the] most challenging thing was the performance." Newell himself played the piano.
Jay Shilliday, chief engineer at Crescendo! Studios, San Francisco, mixed "Subway"; Newell closely supervised the half-day process. "It was not that complicated," says Shilliday. "Andy brought all the elements, and he had done a lot of the work ahead of time. We just needed to balance the music and effects."
In the end, everyone was pleased. "Andy took it to a different maturity level," says Stone. "His music made it seem longer than a thirty-second ad. He always surprises us. That’s why we work with him—the ‘Andy Surprise Factor’ is what keeps us coming back."
