For commercials: spot work might be the most challenging work of all. Here's how they do it - Audio

Post, June, 2002 by David John Farinella

Anyone who works in the audio post for commercial world knows all that goes into a making a spot sound its best. Responsibilities run the gamut from sound design and composing music to ADR, Foley and mixing. To be sure, it's a heady experience for a :15 to one-minute piece of work that plays on the smallest of screens with the most unflattering of sound systems. Any doubters, though, might be interested to find out what's involved. Take the work that Sacred Noise's composer/sound designer Ravi Krishnaswami performed on a commercial for Sunny Delight titled Hydraulic Press. While designing the sound for the hydraulic press itself, Krishnaswami used seven distinct tracks. "It wasn't just a matter of looking up hydraulic press in a sound design library," he says. Rather he "composed" the hydraulic press sounds much like he would a piece of music, filling in a low rumble with a low engine hum, the bass frequency with a repetitive engine knock, the mid-range came with a couple samples of tearing, twisting and bend ing metal, then a pair of add-on sounds that completed the aural picture. Sounds like a piece of cake? Not really. The same holds true for those composing scores or mixing commercial work. Each level of the process holds its own challenge, solution and best used tools.

JONATHAN HELFAND MUSIC & POST, NYC

PROJECT: A recent Pringles spot via Wells, Rich, Greene, NYC

CHALLENGE: "I think the greatest challenge I've ever faced as a mixer has to do with when the pop music world meets the post production world, because the things that go on in a pop studio and what is acceptable and, in fact, good practices, don't always make good sense when they have to go to commercials," Helfand reports.

"For Pringles they had some band in LA who had done a song and a track for them," Hefland recalls. When he sat down to do the mix, the producers asked if the drums and the background singers could be louder. Helfand had requested splits, so it shouldn't have been a problem. "I pulled up the DAT and I had 12 or 13 splits on it," he explains. "I put them into the machine and lined them up and it is freakin' pandemonium. Every track was at a different pitch and therefore at a different length. What we found out later was that they had recorded to a multitrack tape machine that wasn't resolved to anything. So, my task at this point is to get all this music to line up, to be a :30 track and then to go back to what they originally asked for which was to mix it in a way that made sense to the spot."

SOLUTION: "I found one track that was in tune by using a piano," he says with a laugh of his low-tech approach. "So, I used that as my reference and I tuned every track back up to that key." While it was a bit of trial and error, Helfand discovered that half the tracks were the same factor out. "They were locking to themselves and then there were a bunch of wild tracks," he explains. The Fairlight's DSP function helped and once he got everything locked up, he had to edit the song down to 30 seconds and then mixed it to the client's wishes.

TIP: "Have your engineer talk to the mix engineer," Helfand offers. "Because, for instance, we get DATs from music houses all the time that are at zero with an unbelievable ton of compression to keep them there, and zero on a broadcast DAT is not zero, it's -18. So, talk to your engineer. He knows all the ways to keep you in sync. That will keep you out of trouble and will make the workflow go faster."

www.jhmp.com

SOUND LOUNGE, NYC

PROJECT: A spot for New Balance where a woman is depicted running down a road by herself as a thunderstorm approaches. Via Messner Vetere Berger McNamee Schmetterer/Euro RSCG, NYC

CHALLENGE: "The spot was shot with no sound, so the challenge was how to make the storm [seem] like a monster, totally threatening, and maintain the reality of the sound of somebody running on the road by themselves," explains sound designer Marshall Grupp. "There's that line between reality and unreality I guess that was the fun of it."

SOLUTION: Grupp did some Foley work for the sound of the runner and then used a combination of sounds for the storm effect. "It's not just your typical lightning and thunder rumbles, but the use of some sounds that I made up using animal noises, some of my own vocals and adding effects to that," he states. "It changes, it grows. It's not all on one level because if it's on one level then it's kind of boring. It had a birth and it got bigger and larger in scope. By the end, I think you really feel it. It's hard on TV because you lose a lot. But you get a sense that this thing is approaching and as it's approaching it's getting more and more violent sounding." Grupp's quick to add that this is not a one-man success story. "I did have some help from the editor, who supplied some of the thunder roars that they had liked when they were building the temp track. It's a collaborative art form."

TOOLS: Grupp is a Synclavier user. "I have a personal library of about 30,000 sounds, which I try to incorporate and make new sounds with," he says. "I surely didn't do it with a CD library." As for outboard gear, Grupp turned to Eventide's Harmonizer and H-3000. He also used some of the effects in his Yamaha O2R mixing board to get a new sound.