By Christine Champagne

New York-based BBDO Worldwide didn’t waste any time getting a new campaign for Monster underway. In fact, it was just 70 days from the time the agency won the account to the end of production on a worldwide multimedia campaign for the client. The resulting “Your calling is calling”-themed effort includes television, radio, print and online components and strives to get people to take a look at the connection between what they do for a living and their personal fulfillment.

Regarding the four spots featured in the campaign, BBDO art director Chuck Tso, who conceptualized them with copywriter Adam Kanzer, said, “We wanted to do something different for the category–something interesting in terms of telling different visual stories.” One of the commercials in the package, a :60 titled “Daybreak,” is SHOOT’s Top Spot this week. The beautifully executed epic idea will certainly resonate with anyone who has woken up on a Monday morning dreading going to work.

Directed by Nicolai Fuglsig of MJZ, the spot opens in the pre-dawn hours. People all over town are waking up and springing out of bed in a panic. Still in their pajamas, they spill into the streets, grabbing items ranging from suitcases to satellite dishes and running toward a hill. They reach the top of the hill just as the sun is rising and use the items they’ve brought with them as shields against the sun.

The townspeople put up a valiant fight, but they fail to beat back the sun, which rises in the sky, signaling the start of another workweek. “Don’t hate Mondays” appears on the screen as they trudge back home to get ready for work, followed by the Monster logo and the tagline “Your calling is calling,” which, according to Kanzer, represents “the broader idea that there is a great job out there for everyone, and Monster is the way to find it.”

Neither Kanzer nor Tso hates Mondays, by the way. “I think we’re some of the rare exceptions. We love what we do,” Kanzer said. “But when Chuck and I were working on this campaign, we came across the truth that most people don’t like their jobs, and we got this idea that if you love what you do, you don’t dread Sunday night, and you’re not trying to fight against Monday morning happening.”

From the beginning, Kanzer and Tso knew that the execution of “Daybreak” would be challenging given the abstract concept of people battling the sun. “We all had different ideas,” Kanzer said, “and we really have to give a lot of credit to Nicolai because he had the idea–and really felt strongly about it–that people should be grabbing random items from their homes and from the streets and using them almost as shields to fight back the sun.”

Fuglsig, who could not be reached at press time, and DP Benoit Del Homme shot “Daybreak” in Tandil, a town about five hours outside of Buenos Aires. A few principal performers were cast and brought in from Buenos Aires, and several hundred locals played the rest of the roles, braving four, 14-hour shoot days and bright lights that replicated a sunrise. “We tried to get as much of [the sun] as we could in camera. In fact, some of the shots–one in particular where we see the sun really strengthening its push back–are in camera,” Tso said.

Kanzer added, “The light flares you see are actual light flares that the camera guy caught when he was shooting it, then The Mill enhanced it.”

The Mill
A lot of credit goes to The Mill (N.Y.), Tso praised. “We collectively worked with The Mill to visualize what the sun would look like,” Tso said, noting, “It was a careful balance. We wanted to push the boundaries of what natural light can be versus a look that was more Close Encounters.”

Rick Russell of Final Cut, New York, edited “Daybreak,” working alone, then with Fuglsig and later the agency creatives. “Rick had several versions to show us that first day we came in, all of which were great,” Tso said. “There was one particular cut we liked, and we just finessed it.” Russell was also instrumental in the music. One of the big decisions to make was whether or not the presence of the sun would take on its own sound effect. “We were possibly looking for a sound that captured the sun, but it was Rick’s suggestion that we build it into the music track–the music could swell at a certain point when the presence of the sun was felt, then we would be killing two birds with one stone,” Tso said. “That was a tremendous insight because we didn’t want this thing to be too layered, too thick.”

Debut score
The raw and moody track came from Cherry-Tate Music Productions, New York, recently formed by Rebecca Cherry and Terressa Tate, who is also a sound designer at Final Cut. “Daybreak” marks Cherry-Tate’s first job, and the duo worked together to compose and arrange the piece. In terms of tone, Tate said that she and Cherry didn’t want to go completely dark. “We thought ‘quirky suburban’ going into it, but it still needed an emotional edge,” Tate said, crediting Cherry’s violin playing with capturing the emotion of the spot. “You really start to feel their struggle.”

There isn’t any dialogue in “Daybreak” because the spot is running internationally. “To minimize anything being lost in translation we downplayed dialogue and went for big, visual, epic ideas [with all the spots in the campaign],” Tso explained.

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