Most of us who make commercials believe that the visuals are the most important part.
This is because the visuals are the most obvious part.
Which, of course, is why visuals are what wins awards.
Which, in turn, is why we care more about visuals.
And so on.
We act as if sound was merely there to decorate the pictures.
But actually, when we do this we’re only operating in one dimension.
This happens because the sound is the part we don’t notice.
But in the real world (the world outside awards juries) it often it has a bigger effect than the part that we do notice.
When my children were small they’d sometimes watch scary movies on TV.
Sometimes they’d get really frightened.
Because I didn’t want them to get nightmares, I’d just turn the sound off.
Then let them watch for a while with no sound.
So they could see what was scaring them was their imagination.
Which is where sound works.
You now what, horror movies aren’t nearly so scary without sound.
Kubrick was one of the few directors that understood sound.
That’s why he’d use it as a counter-point for the visual.
Not just to decorate it, but to amplify it.
Take Clockwork Orange.
The part where the thugs kick a tramp to death in the underpass.
Not just to the grunts and thumps you’d expect.
Or even a violent heavy-metal track.
But instead, they kick him to death to the lyrical melody ‘Singing In The Rain’.
Because it’s the opposite of the visual it makes it so much more powerful.
Like the marines at the end of Full Metal Jacket.
Marching away from death and destruction and a ruined city.
But not to the Rolling Stones singing, “Paint it Black”, as you’d expect.
They’re all marching off singing The Mickey Mouse Club Theme Tune.
Trained killers joining together in an innocent children’s song.
That was Eisenstein’s theory of film.
1+1=3.
Sound can change what we’re looking at.
The BBC showed the same footage twice, of the burning oil wells of Kuwait after the first Gulf war.
First they showed the footage with Chris Rea’s “Road To Hell”.
Then they showed it with Mozart’s Requiem.
Totally different experience.
One track made the visuals graphic and exciting.
The other track made them a sad, timeless comment on mankind.
When I was at college in New York, there were two public broadcast channels.
One on radio (WBAI), the other on TV (Channel 13).
They were both viewer/listener sponsored, so there were no commercials.
Consequently they could be more experimental.
One time I remember they showed a two-hour film by an experimental animator called Fred Mogubgub.
They played one soundtrack on the TV against the picture, and a totally different soundtrack on the radio.
Then every 10 minutes they’d remind you to switch from one to the other, to see how it changed the pictures you were watching.
It was a great lesson in how sound can dictate vision.
How our imagination can dictate what we see.
Over here, Channel 5 did a similar thing a few year’s back with London Live 94.9 FM.
They showed a football game between (I think) Spurs and Liverpool.
Channel 5 broadcast the serious commentary to go with the game.
London Live 94.9 FM broadcast a commentary from two Australian comedians, watching the game live on a TV in the car park outside the stadium.
The commentary on the radio added way more to the game than the TV commentary, which was just decoration for the visuals.
They only did it the once but, if I could, I’d watch every game that way.
“How stupid does that goalie feel missing a sitter like that?”
“Yeah, and look at that haircut, what a wally.”
“Hey mate, your whole family’s watching and you just blew it.”
It actually made watching it on TV a better experience than going to the game.
Finally, to prove how important sound is, find someone who’s not in advertising.
Ask them what they remember about Hovis advertising.
I bet it won’t be Ridley Scott’s fantastic camera work they talk about.
I bet they start to whistle or hum a snatch of Dvorjak’s New World Symphony, played by a colliery brass band.
And that ran 30 years ago.
It’s not the visuals that the public take off the screen, and get passed into the language.
It’s the sound.
Sound was viral long before YouTube.
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you are so right dave
hamlet cigar ads> very funny in their own right,
but then add Bach’s Air on the G-String, and 1+1=3
That’s right.
It’s the seemingly small things in life that count.
It’s the sound that resonates inside the head that brings back the memories and the feelings.
Having been though a difficult patch, which we all get sometimes in our life if we’re truly honest, I got up at about 05.30 on a Saturday morning and sat on the back garden steps. The sun was coming up, the sky was blue, and one solitary bird started to sing.
Hearing the first bird sing his solitary song in this vast auditorium of silence, I noticed others were joining in from afar, within ten minutes the whole sky was filled with invisible sounds ‘tuning up’ like some grand orchestra, and then they played the overture.
It was heaven on earth. The Dawn Chorus is exactly what it says it is. Feeling on top of the World, I went back to bed and told my wife.
She replied: ‘Oh for Christ’s sake, it’s only 6 am!’
The Exorcist being a classic case in point. Designed a complex, layered soundtrack of very sinister SFX to work on the subconscious and create what is a truly evil viewing experience. One of the SFX they used, apparently, was the sound of pigs screaming as they were taken into an abattoir. *Inserts scared face smiley.
The natural model:
http://ex-blank-page.blogspot.com/2009/05/in-reply-to-daves-great-posts-36.html
I still turn the sound down with scary bits on the TV . makes for a far calmer viewing experience
Sound sticks around for far longer; of course, if we had smellivision, that would be the most provocative sense.
Back to ‘Jaws’ again. All you need is the music.
HI Dave.
Those Aussie blokes are called Roy and HG. I lived and worked over in Australia for a few years. Everyone I knew would watch every rugby league game with the sound down and Roy and HG’s funny radio commentary. It’s a real Aussie tradition.
That’s it Ant: Roy and HG.
Totally brilliant idea, I wish they’d do it over here.
Ant.
I met an American woman in Soho yesterday and she thought I was an Australian.
I told her I was cockney, which sounded similar to Americans..
It’s because Australia used to be a penal colony and all the convicts were cockneys.
Not sure she believed me.
But look at what’s come from Oz: The Sun & Sky TV (both owned by Murdoch), Roy & HG, Campaign Palace, all very London.
I thought the Sony Paint ad was a great demonstration of this. Graham Fink said in Campaign that music was 50% of the ad, and the original soundtrack to that one was really underwhelming.
Then they ran it again with no soundtrack, just SFX, and it was much better by comparison. Then someone on a jury said that it was a masterstroke getting rid of the soundtrack and that’s why it ended up being BTAA ad of the year.
Surely just a correction of an error?
Like all civilised people, we may have to agree to disagree Ben.
Personally I thought what was brilliant was nicking Debussey’s ‘Claire de Lune” from the Bellagio scene in Ocean’s 11.
Even with your back turned to the picture, that music is a mesmerising.
But it depends on who they did the ad for.
Maybe SFX is better for the cultural elite, but Sun readers aren’t going to be whistling it in the street.
Dave,
” … all the convicts were cockneys.”
What about the Irish? Ned Kelly is turning in his grave!
Ciaran
Any way I look at it, at least in terms of memorability music wins. Most people remember songs they learned in their childhood, but very few remember very few poems.
Ciaran,
Remember how Jack Charlton built the team that beat Italy 1-0.
Every cockney’s got an Irish granny.
Yeah, I get that a lot whenever I’m in New York, Dave – Americans asking if I’m Australian. Does my head in, but I can see how my East London/Essex accent must sound similar to Australian to them.
Other London-ish things that have come out of Oz: Kath ‘n’ Kim and Summer Heights High (both very influenced by Fawlty Towers/The Office), Nick Cave (inspired by the ‘70s London punk scene), You Am I (reminiscent of The Who/The Kinks), Peter Carey (inspired by his time working in advertising in London in the ‘60s).
All my Aussie mates have a very East London-y straightforwardness. I think that’s why Aussies do so well in advertising over here.
Don’t laugh, Dave.
Your ‘Clockwork Orange’ and ‘Full Metal Jacket’ are very good examples.
Reminds me of when I first watched ‘Good Morning Vietnam’.
The final scene of one-legged people, boots in minefields and other gore was a lot more memorable, I think, played against Armstrong’s ‘What A Wonderful World’.
Any tips of finding good soundtracks for tv commercials?
Hovis is great.
Most art directors I work with say, ‘just bung on any old track’.
What’s sometimes annoying is finding a good track and the client not wanting to pay for it.
I once met Tim Ashton who did Levi’s ‘Ed Clayman’.
He said he just briefed the Virgin Marble Arch guy.
Gave him 150 quid and told him to provide 10 CDs.
Not sure if agencies allow that kind of spending these days.
Thanks.
somebody i know has the same experience about scary movies - they are not so scary without sound
and s’pose you switch off video as well and just had spooky sounds in your house at night… you’d be more scarred than watching the worst horror movie…
true thing about sound …
Whilst I’m all for the ’straightforwardness’ of the antipodean colonial, I also have one foot in the camp of Oscar Wilde and his musing of those that call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.
To prove your point, Dave, watch this. the whole meaning of the opening title sequence, completely changed
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr-e3qGQ884
Desmond,
About your comment: ‘is sound scarier on its own?’
One Halloween I got a blank C120 cassette tape and wound it about half way.
Then I recorded groans and chains clanking.
Then I would it back to the beginning.
That night I turned the cassette player on in another room without my kids seeing.
Then we sat down in the dark to tell ghost stories.
After about half hour the groans and clanking started in the other room.
That really answered the question about whether sound could be scary without pictures.
If I hear groans and clanking coming from next door it tends to get my goat.
Top of my head for creating tension. I thought the score for ‘French Connection’ was brilliant and the rousing conclusion in a Vegas airport terminal in the utterly brilliant ‘Midnight Run’: “Serrano’s got the disks! “
John, I think Scorcese understands sound better than most directors.
The entire noir jazz soundtrack on Taxi Driver sets up Travis Bickle’s encroaching madness.
I think to see how to get sound wrong watch Ridley’s ‘Columbus 1492′ with a Van Gellis soundtrack.
When he could have used 16th century Spanish monastic and native American music instead.
Bernard Herrmann is the man! Hitchcock knew how to use him too. Interestingly did you see the recent South Bank Show on William Goldman? He mentioned the debt that Hitch owed to Ernest Lehman for ‘North by Northwest’, who was introduced to Hitch by Bernard. It’s a small world.
I didn’t see it yet, but I recorded it on Sky+. so I’ll watch it tonight,
I love Goldman and Hitchcock so it sounds like it should be good.
Another technique worth considering:
If you don’t use dialogue, the soundtrack replaces the missing conversation — for more details, ask Kim Ki-duk.
‘Finishing’, ‘Leaving’, ‘Storm’, ‘Crash’.
“I’ve still got it”.
Brilliant.
Just to go back to sound. I seem to recall the selection of Strauss’s The Blue Danube waltz for the space docking sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey, as being an accident.
Apparently Kubrick wanted to see some rushes with sound. The record was just lying around. More accident than conspiracy again!
Yup Webster always told me that.
http://cstadvertising.com/blog/2008/08/14/
dave, funny you mention taxi driver. i saw the fully intended by scorsese stereo mix of that movie on a rainy day in LA in the 90s.. that was the hoopla: the rerelease with great sound. and i have to say it added to the experience, and the story, enormously.
a radio station here in chicago plays 1940s dramatic serials here on saturdays. radio was where it was at. big stars.
and dave,
while i am not qualified to judge sound & film but as just someone in the audience, i often feel advertising films make far more accomplished use of sound than feature films…
especially when sound is central to the selling idea in the commercial…
this volkwagen commercial, where two little boys are sitting on their doorstep, mock-driving a car each, hands moving like they are on the steering wheel, making engine sounds with their mouths - this sound here is perfect.
how many feature films can u think of where sound is central to idea in the film?
Dave
You are a veritable treasure trove of information.
Hi Vinny,
Yeah the radio plays were great, so melodramatic.
My son, who’s 22 now, just bought the complete set of Raymond Chandler CDs he remembers from when he was a kid, we just listened again and they’re still great.
Sound without pictures makes them even more noir.
Simon.
Disturbing strokes is a great example.
Anyone who hasn’t yet seen it should click on your link above.
John.
Likewise. I haven’t mentioned a film yet that you haven’t been able to quote the complete script of.
Seventy Seven Sunset Strip, click click, Seventy Seven Sunset Strip, click click. Seventy Seven Sunset Strip, click click, Seventy Seven Sunset Strip, click click. Unforgettable. Genius lyrics. Genius music. Whatever happened to genius? And the fat drummer hit the beat with all his heart. Dum de dum de dum. I don’t think so.
Jack
Is Ken Barlow going to go off with Martha in his longboat? Here’s to waiting. …
Here’s to their dream
Cannes lion 1998/99:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y087sbBRQWY
There is a brilliant scene in John Carpenter’s Assault On Precinct 13 where the gang bangers are firing with silenced rifles into the police station. Not a bang or an explosion to be heard - just the quiet ‘phuttts’ as the hail of bullets shatters windows, pockmarks walls and pierces bodies - and all the scarier for it.
Well spotted Riki.
That’s a good demonstration of the principle.
Absolutely.
Im sure someone will have said already, but imagine Sony Balls without that acoustic soundtrack. Imagine Honda Cog with music instead of the clunks of tools and bits. Imagine Gorilla with silence.
Actually from the DT perspective, two of your best known ads were ones that used sound really well alongside the visuals (Ariston/Toshiba).
Good stuff Riki
Movie wise I’ll also cough up Priesner for Three Colours: Blue and Morricone for The Good, The Bad and The Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West.
…also Elfman (Midnight Run) for Milk and another ‘man’, Rahman for Slumdog Millionaire.
Dave
Thinking further. Kubrick was also a master of irony: “Honey, I’m home….” Or, monkey-bone cut to space station.