The Reel World - July/August

July/August 2001 Keyboard - "THE HIRE - BMW"



 

My July and August 2001 Reel World columns are about a very ambitious and high profile ad campaign created by BMW. In essence, BMW hired five very successful 'hot' film directors to each create a short (6 to 8 minute) short film that featured, though never mentioned their cars by name. These films can be seen at bmwfilms.com

Each film had a television commercial designed to work as a 'trailer' for the film. I did the music for one of the films and one of the tv trailers

"The Hire" A BMW Short Film- Part 1
(July)
As part of my studio slimming program I finally sold off many of my rack mounted samplers in favor of the more powerful and organizable PC-based GigaStudios. The only "old school" samplers left from my previous arsenal are a couple of Emus and my trusted top of the line Akais. The Akai S5000 and S6000 have an available USB port that allows them to function much like a computer peripheral, which makes them a bit like the best of both worlds. I can move samples easily between my computer and the Akai samplers in order to play them from a keyboard versus using them in an audio track of my sequencer. In the meantime I have connected all my PCs together with an Ethernet hub. This also connects them to a Macintosh running a program called DAVE, which allows my assistant and myself access to the sound files on the PCs from the comforts of the Mac for organization and manipulation. I can also move samples between computers as needed without copying to an external drive. They are all part of one network which share the drives.
I still have some ways to go toward my 'virtual studio', but because of my schedule I am doing things a step at a time. I have a second Macintosh now that is being set up to serve as a gaggle of software-based synths and samplers that will feed directly into my sequencer's audio mixer. And I just had my studio racks modified with sound deadening glass doors to significantly cut down the ambient sound in my studio from all the drives and fans. Nice.
I'm currently at work scoring the pilot for a new TV series based on a popular Steven King novel and produced by the same producers who have created the newer Star Trek series. But prior to this score I was involved in an interesting project in the commercial world. Except it wasn't a commercial, really. BMW, one of the leading makers of roadworthy objects of desire, commissioned five top film directors to each make a short film featuring, but never mentioning, their cars. Each director was given an enormous amount of artistic freedom to come up with whatever they wanted, with minimal interference from the "producers" at BMW or their advertising agency. One actor, Clive Owen of British indie hit "Croupier" fame, appears in each as the driver of a car involved in the storyline. This is the only real link between these films.
The directors participating in the project are John Frankenheimer (Ronin), Wong Kar-Wei (Chung King Express), Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), Guy Ritchie (Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrells), and Xxxx Xxxx (Amores Perros). All are vibrant interesting directors with little need or interest to be making car commercials, which makes the project so much more interesting.
The project is ambitious. Each film is edited in a shorter "web form" and a longer "director's cut" version. The latter, averaging eight versus six minutes, will go onto a DVD compilation of all five films, plus a "making of" documentary, and who knows what else. The shorter versions will be seen in only one place: www.bmwfilms.com. The website is slick and well designed, and does allow the viewer to not only watch the films, one posted every couple of weeks, but to also explore the many reasons one *must* own a BMW in order to be viewed as a success in any possible way (and thus the ultimate reason BMW is making these films).
Each film has a companion thirty second television trailer to entice people to the website to watch the actual film. My first involvement in the project was to score one of the trailers, for the film by Ang Lee, whose film was already scored by Mychael Danna. I was approached by LA-based Primal Scream, an major commercial music production company that had been contracted by BMW's ad agency to produce all of the trailer music. Ang Lee's film is a bit hard to describe except that it features a child that might be the next Dalai Lama and a car chase to keep him safe from some rogue monks. The trailer had a temp score that I actually liked pretty well, with some cool Asian flutes and bells, except that one section had some techno beats that seemed not only out of place, but too much like a number of BMW spots. I knew how important it was to differentiate these films and trailers from anything traditionally BMW. I suggested that I retain the energy and drive, but do so in a much less conventional way with taikos and other eastern drums pounding a compelling beat along with electronic bass. I had some drum performances from a highly obscure Japanese percussion CD I had found a long time ago. It's cheating to use, but there is no way for this recording to be traced back to its source (I once tried), and any time I use it I usually mess with the sound enough to make it relatively unrecognizable from the original. (OK, enough justification). I retuned it to match my target tempo of 140 BPM. I added a bass line played on my super punchy Access Virus synth, and little more. For the opening and closing section of the spot, I played flutes, along with samples of bells, some voices, and again, not much more.
I delivered my demo back to the ad agency people who were very pleased. From there it went to BMW, who asked that the faster section be more techno, like the temp, and other BMW commercials. I had already mixed the spot and delivered it to the studio where they were mixing the music, effects and dialog. The agency people felt it was important to give BMW at least a little more of what they wanted. I ran back to my studio and, using Reason, I devised an extra stereo track to layer on top of my original spot. I burned it onto a CD ROM and returned to the studio where they lined it up to my other tracks and all was well. You can hear the final track at www.reelworld-online.com
Completely by coincidence, I got a call a week or two later from Joel Goodman, a friend and fellow composer living in New York. He had been asked to produce a music track for one of the main BMW films directed by Hong Kong-based Wong Kar-wei. He needed to come to LA to do the job and needed a studio to work from, and I was happy to oblige. The film called for an arrangement of a beautiful Cuban ballad, to be sung in Spanish. At first, I was simply helping him out with the arrangement and logistics of the recordings, but as we got into it, it was decided to simply do the whole thing together.
The project called for four separate arrangements of the song to accommodate the longer and shorter versions of the film, and for two versions in each film. We sequenced the tracks together in Logic and within a day or two met with "Director Wong" to play the music. He had a number of notes for us to make changes. He is an intellectual and an experimentalist, and wanted to try things a number of ways before settling down to what he liked. I brought in Peruvian singer Cecelia Noel to do the vocals, and, on the director's request, a male singer as a possible alternative approach.
With the director, ad agency people, the film's producers, as well as a documentary cameraman all crowded into my studio we began recording vocals. To please the director we recorded Cecelia singing the song every possible way, from soft and introspective to loud and passionate. We spent about three hours with her, and then began the process of editing her vocals in the sequencer.
I'll give some more details and how the project ended up in my next column. In the meantime you can hear the tracks on my website at www.reelworld-online.com. Enjoy.

"The Hire" A BMW Short Film - Part 2
(August)

In last month's column I detailed creating the music for a very novel advertisement from BMW. A series of five short films from some of today's top directors are running at www.bmwfilms.com. Each film has an accompanying trailer (a commercial really) for television. I scored the trailer for the film directed by Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). Following that, and working with New York-based composer/producer Joel Goodman, I arranged and produced music for another of the short films, this one directed by Hong Kong-based director Wong Kar-wai, who has a cultish following around the world for his moody noirish films such as "Chung King Express" and "In The Mood For Love."
The job here was to record four different arrangements of a very beautiful Cuban ballad called "Unicornio." There was a recording of the song used to temp the film by Peruvian chanteuse Mercedes Sosa. I believe they looked into using it at first, but they were unable to license it. I suppose they might also have been too moved by the irony of trying to market BMWs with someone named Mercedes. By the end of the project it was different enough that simply editing it would not have worked. So on with the arrangements and production.
We met the first morning with director Kar-wai and the producers of the films at my studio. We watched a cut of the film together. This was an opportunity to meet, get to know each other, talk about general style and approach, and discuss any issues or questions before starting in on the work itself. Wong Kar-wai is a tall, personable guy, whose English is excellent, but whose approach to work is decidedly non-western. It was important for us to listen carefully to his ideas and desires and see how we could best manifest them. The meeting was brief and rather casual. He was in a rush to see some final picture changes with the editor.
Immediately after the meeting we began by taking a few of the musical elements of the Sosa track used in the temp. We began to put together a sound template here in my studio of synth pads, electric piano, percussion, and some little twinkly effects. I wanted something unusual and haunting for an instrumental break in the song, and so I used a sample of an Armenian wind instrument called the duduk.
Goodman had some percussion tracks from a recent session he had done back in New York that he thought would lend themselves well to the song. His assistant put the files onto their ftp site, which is a standard method for sharing file via the internet. We used a small application on our computer here in LA to scan the server's directory in NY and copy the file to my drive. We then placed the audio into a track in Logic and fine tuned it to flow with the song.
The song occurs twice in the film, and there are two version of the film, one for the bmwfilms.com website, and a longer "directors cut" for the DVD that will come out later. Thus we needed to do four versions of the song. Each version was not only timed to fit the scene, but several hits and transitions changed from version to version. We created the longest version first, so that we could use it as the basis of the other versions. We used a piano sample for the vocal line.
With the main demo done it was time to do what you do when working on an advertisement - meet with the people from the agency to see what they think. They came the next morning along with the director to listen. The key thing in playback sessions like this, whether for a film, series or ad, is to remain very open minded to any and all suggestions, whether or not you initially agree with them. Let everyone say what they have to say. Listen carefully. Don't interrupt. Let everyone have their say and size up the situation if there are any disagreements. And by all means use this time to your advantage to learn what people want, whether they are articulate or not.
Fortunately there weren't too many problems, and once everyone agreed on the final direction and gave their notes, we could make the fixes by the end of the day and begin work on the three other versions of Unicornio. Also, we discussed preparations for the next step, which was to bring in the singer to perform the lead vocal. Wong Kar-wai functions by experimentation. He want's to try things out before deciding if he likes it or not. He asked that we bring in both a female and male singer so he could choose after hearing them. I called around to some friends to find a couple of Spanish singers, preferably from South America. It took the better part of a day, but I found two superb singers who were available to come the next evening. Later that afternoon my duduk player came and performed his parts for the tracks and added some beautiful sounds. We also brought in a cellist to play some lines, but asked him to play with no vibrato and a slightly harsh tone, as though to create the sound of a more primitive style instrument.
Recording vocals is such a delicate operation. The mood must be right, the technology flawless. In this case I decided to record the vocals right in my writing room - no control booth. The director, about four ad agency people, two singers, my writing partner, my assistant and myself crammed ourselves into the room. I've found that with the right microphone, you can have room speakers playing softly with no more bleedthrough than loud headphones. So I put the vocalist up to the mic, gave her own headphone mix, and played music softly for the assembled crowd. I'd never worked with her before, and I was nervous about how she would go over (everyone involved had really fallen in love with Merceded Sosa's voice so much). The first few takes were nothing great, but our singer turned out to be wonderful, and people were very pleased. But the director wanted her to sing it every possible way - loud and strong, soft and sultry, and everything in between. We had gone well past the 90 minutes I had hoped to use for her before having the male singer take a crack at it. As time went on it was clear that we would never even get to him. Fortunately he gets paid the same whether he sings or not, so the downside to not being used is fairly small. We ended up spending about three hours with our female singer before deciding we had everything we needed.
After the singers left, I sat with Wong Kar-wai and went through her vocals. We picked it apart line by line and started to make an assembly of the best takes within each style. Soon we had our loud version and soft version. We tried a combination of the two, to give a sense of starting soft and getting louder, but her vocals could never match and the edits were too obvious. We agreed to polish up both vocal edits and have both available at the final dub so he could make his final choice. The vocals were edited for the other three versions. The dub was the next day, so this one was an all nighter. No sleep.
The dub took two full days, a lot for a six minute project. The sound designer for the project, Claude Letessier, is one of my absolute favorite sound artists around. He had created a beautiful soundscape for the tracks. As it came time to lay in the music, it was decided to eliminate a few bars of the introduction and come in just as the vocals did. The vocals would enter alone and the tracks would fade up under her. It worked beautifully. Again, it is important to be open-minded and allow new things to happen during a dub. The director wanted to try everything. Loud vocal, soft vocal. We pushed up the duduk and even copied a phrase to repeat at another spot. We moved parts around and played until we came up with something that blended well with the dialog and other sounds. I stayed to the end to be sure that Kar-wai was pleased. He was.
Time to sleep. Listen to the track at www.reelworld-online.com.

All musical examples are (c) 2001 BMW