Porsche is the epitome of finely tuned automotive performance—appropriately enough, also living up to that elevated bar is the vehicle’s Burmester High-End Surround Sound System.
Reflecting this in a most inventive way is “High Speed Orchestra,” a spot directed by Bart Timmer via Czar Film, Berlin, for Hamburg, Germany-based agency Grabarz & Partner.
We see a orchestra playing “Winter” from Antonio Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons.” While doing justice to the piece itself is challenging, even more so for orchestra members is staying on their feet. The musicians inexplicably are flying all about, swaying to and fro while performing. A confused conductor looks on.
An explanation finally surfaces as we see a Porsche navigating tight curves, making hairpin turns. The accompanying line is simply, “Taking the concert around corners.” We then realize that both the orchestra and the car are being put through their paces, the featured attraction being the car’s state-of-the-art sound system. You can experience both the visceral joy of riding in a Porsche along with the aural delight of hearing the best in music.
“High Speed Orchestra” topped SHOOT’s quarterly Top Ten Chart, with Yessian Music serving as the music, sound and audio post house.
Insights from Yessian
SHOOT connected with Yessian Music chief creative officer Brian Yessian and sr. producer Uli Witt for insights into the work which, they quipped, posed the creative challenge of how to hurl 40 people through a room while playing Vivaldi.
Witt recalled, “When we were approached by Czar Film and director Bart Timmer with the Porsche ‘High Speed Orchestra’ project in May 2017, we were stoked immediately. From the very first moment we knew that we would encounter quite a few risks during the process, especially the believability of the musicians playing this piece as they are moving from side to side on the stage.
“One big aspect of modern production is that you need to always leave all the options open and commit to bettering the idea during the postproduction phase. Shooting and recording an orchestra that plays Vivaldi’s ‘Winter’ is one thing, but staging an orchestra playing Vivaldi while being hurled through a concert hall is a total different animal. That’s why we came up with a workflow that would let the production focus on the performance of the acting, on the moving platform, on the camera performance and grip work, while foregoing the musical precision and quality during the shoot, so not only did we concentrate on the performance on stage, we also had to be able to fix and tune things afterwards.”
Witt added, “Czar Film and Bart Timmer both knew as well as we did, that we had to create a guide track before the shoot that would preset the movements of the musicians, and that we would do the groundwork for the dynamic and the humor of the whole film with that; you can’t show something iconic like a Porsche and hear something restrained as Eric Satie’s Gymnopédie No.1 for example. At this point we were still entertaining the idea of being able to compose something entirely new once we’d see the first editing results and would need to tweak the music into a certain direction.”
But the selection of the Vivaldi piece proved ideal, according to Yessian. “When we picked Vivaldi’s Winter movement we knew that it would be hard to find something else with the same intense expression of verve and passion,” related Yessian. “Although we were only using an edit of an existing record of the piece as a skeleton at first, merely for storyboard and production planning, we then went on to create a rearranged track for the musicians on set that we could notate for every instrument on camera—it quickly became clear during the offline edit that the piece was just the right choice for a Porsche film. We found THE musical icon to match its automotive counterpart.
“The next step was adding a lot of instruments into the raw guide track that really can’t be found in the original chamber orchestra piece; it’s only 13 to 16 strings and a harpsichord originally. Bart decided to go with a full symphonic orchestra of 40 people to have the biggest visual impact possible. So that’s what we did—re-orchestrate Vivaldi for a full orchestra.”
Witt explained, “After the shoot, we meticulously recreated the guide track instrument by instrument. This allowed us to micro-time each instrument and tweak volume and stereo panning to match everything to the picture, the room and the POV of the camera. When you see the timpani, you need to be able to lift it out of the mix. Lastly we digitally transferred all the camera movements and sound reflections onto the stereo image of the mix so that the viewer would immerse in the midst of a full orchestra, playing one of the fastest and intense classical pieces of music. In the end, after many weeks of work, we were very happy and proud that our very first version of the final artwork remained unchanged and was eventually aired.”
See October's Top Ten Music Tracks here.
