Metatechnik, bicoastal music and sound producer, has produced all of the audio components for a new Burger King campaign (Crispin Porter + Bogusky), for the German market. The 3 spots, featuring puppet marionettes out of fairy tales placed in modern day Burger King restaurants, encompass an off beat, quirky and surreal musical score. The “real to life” sound design draws out the quirkiness in the juxtaposition of the spots. Metatechnik’s own German, Georg Bissen, cast and produced the voice over talent out of Berlin, Germany.
The diverse make up of Meta’s team is what makes its compositions so unique. With each composer specializing in different genres, the combined forces of the composing team create unpredictable and unquestionably original pieces. For the challenges MetaTechnik faced in producing the three Burger King spots: Rotkäppchen (Red Ridinghood), Goldesel (Magic Donkey) and Der Hungrige Riese (The Hungry Giant) for Crispin Porter, their quirky blend was really spot on with the music created for the campaign. However, the challenges began with the casting and recording of the character voice-overs done in Berlin.
Fortunately, owner and executive producer Georg Bissen is a German native, born and raised. This worked to the company advantage, as he was able to find the best character local talents appropriate for such a challenging job. “To cast the right character voices, for a wolf, a farmer, a giant, little red riding hood – you really had to understand the tone and feel of the language, let alone speak the language”, says Bissen. He found wonderful talents in Berlin, who he had do audition reads for the creatives at Crispin Boulder and New York. “They could only really listen down for energy, tonality and vibe to find the right voice, but it was ultimately up to us to make the right selections, due to the language barrier,” Bissen explains. For the three fairy-tale based spots, the company recorded the sessions through their sister studio in Berlin, and were able to produce the talents via line patches in New York. Again, with Bissen as the German speaking chief engineer, he was going through hundreds of takes, editing together final reads – which would have been impossible without speaking German.
“The time changes always posed an interesting challenge, but you get used to working at all hours of the day and night” Bissen says, with his partner and co-founder Victoria Wallace in Los Angeles, and a great bulk of his dance music clients in the UK and Europe. “When I am producing a dance track, or doing a remix, I really have to be able to work at any hour”. But any time of day or night could never stop Bissen, with deep routes in the underground club world, having been a DJ and producer for years, he is no stranger to the wee hours of the morning.
The sound design elements for the Burger King spots were all very “realistic”. Everyone wanted to go with a more traditional, predictable soundscape, to counter balance the quirky and unsettling images of wooden marionettes ordering their 99 Euro burgers in a life like Burger King setting. The tricky part was finding the right sound for wooden marionettes. After searching through over 250,000 sounds in the Metatechnik sound design library, it was clear that the one specific sound they needed was simply not there. Bissen ended up having to improvise by recording bamboo wind chimes, by sliding, bouncing and dragging them over a wooden table. It was the only was to achieve the perfect sound everyone was looking for. “Its always fun to get creative when it comes to sound design, it really allows you to open your mind and think of anything at your disposal that could “sound” in another way. We love recording our own sounds,” adds Bissen. “Once the sound design was locked, and we had the voice overs recorded, the spots really started to come together and the quirky mood that the animators over at Hornet had created all started to pop out!”, says Wallace. “It was such a thrilling process, as the job basically was worked on in LA, Boulder, New York and Berlin! The commercials really have that great Euro vibe, but translate amazingly over to an American audience”.
When the Metatechnik team arrived at composing the music for the commercial, they were playing with different ideas of traditional fairy tale compositions, against German folk music. “We wanted that ‘oompa’ feel to be in there”, says Wallace, “But wanted to give the track a modern and quirky life that speaks to a more contemporary pop culture”. Once listening to the track, one can hear that Metatechnik did exactly that. The composition teeters right on the edge of a haunting dark fairy tale, and a playful quirky rhapsody.
About MetaTechnik
MetaTechnik was founded in 2000 by Georg Bissen, Shahin Motia and Victoria Wallace, and has gone on to win hundreds of national spots and produced the music for several big hit television shows (Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Cover Shot). From Jell-O, to AT&T, and most recently, a hilarious Sierra Mist campaign. You can hear Meta’s music across International networks and advertisements. In addition to their commercial successes as a music production facility, composers Bissen, Motia and Wallace also have multiple international hit singles (The Vault, Let Me Breathe, Quicksand) and records from the dance world (Melting, Like I Do) to the indie art epi center (Ex Models, Knyfe Hyts.)
Visit www.metatechnik.com to listen to all of their work.
