Aug 2005
Wall Of Sound - Fields gets animated for Back
To School
08/15/05 01:10 PM

Its safe to say that few things might be more unpredictable than Mr. Spector (check out the hair) - other than the world of retail. Gone are the times when a simple Back To School event was guaranteed to bring in large wads of do-re-me. Or, in Phil's lexicon, "da-doo-ron-ron". Creativity and ingenuity are now the order of the day.
Enter, the Video Wall...with sound.
Phil Spector. Cute & cuddly as ever.
For Marshall Fields Back To School Event we did the sound-design and mixes for four in-store video wall shorts that were created in an Anime style. This was a fun challenge because sound effects in Anime are rarely literal and are commonly awkward; birds might not twitter but honk, while snails utter bizarre notes. When sounds work - its creative euphoria. When they don't, you're parked at the Mac - perplexed, curious, and in need of someone throwing you a bone. Thankfully, Jocelyn Okubo, the producer, got us the picture ahead of time so that we could frame in our sound effect treatments before we put in the music - which, by the way, was done by former Soul Coughing keyboardist Mark De Gli Antoni.
These animated shorts were the brainchild of Jency Collopy (Art Director) Adam Reynolds, (Copywriter) and Chad Alan Albers who did all the illustrations. Knowing that Anime would be popular with young adults and their parents they designed some visuals that hit on the trends — denim, backpacks, home/dorm items etc. Those ideas lead to in-store signs that displayed the trends without screaming "You need a backpack" or "buy denim to be cool." The videos became the logical extension of those illustrations.
The names that pop-up during these shorts have their own funny back story. When Adam was a kid his family hosted some foreign exchange students named "Tomoye Nawata" and "Yukari". Great names, but nobody thought they'd work for this project. So they checked the credits of the Anime flick, Spirited Away. But "Tsunehiko," "Bunta" and "Lauren Holly" didn't cut it either. In the end, they used "Kumiko" (Jency's name - translated into Japanese) and "Illian" which is Adam's friend's daughter's name. Or so he thought. His friend lives in China and his baby girl's name is spelled "Iilen", and pronounced Ee-Lan. Oops.
Hopefully, Adam's friend doesn't cue up and play an old Wall Of Sound classic from Phil Spector - "I Don't Need You Anymore"
Here's "Stock Up"
Additional kudos need to go to Marshall Field's Creative Director Greg Clark, Creative Manager Heather Thornswood, and Media Specialist Brian Shelly. No Twin Cities voice-over actors were harmed, injured, or otherwise maimed during the course of the recording and production.
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Back To The Future - Can you get from 1853 to
2005 in under :60?
08/01/05 02:28 PM
Unless you own a
Delorean
with
Dr.Emmett Brown
or
Marty Mcfly
by your side your options are limited.
Personally, we found it takes a little bit of time (no pun intended), ingenuity, new technology and a touch of luck.
First, some background...
Kruskopf Coontz, a Twin Cities ad agency with whom we do a lot of work, contacted us about a unique radio project for St. Josephs Hospital. Saint Joseph's, Minnesota's first hospital, has always been known for great patient care but people haven't typically thought of them for having advanced medical technology - even though they've been a leader in this field for years with innovative treatments like the CyberKnife. This is an incredible tool which allows them to do full body radiosurgery using image-guided robotics. In simpler terms, it's a highly accurate way of delivering radiation to specific places in the body without a lot of collateral damage to the surrounding tissue.
And I thought my iPod was cool.
Scott Jorgensen, the writer for this radio spot, thought that aurally displaying the time line might be the most innovative way to show that St. Joseph's has always been at the forefront of technology - and that they've been doing so for a long time. His question to me was, "can we easily create the effect of someone's voice going from very old to very young over the course of a minute". My response was, "Walgreens called. Your meds are in - sorry for the delay" With that, we went to work.
With the cost of an ISDN recording session being out of the question, Scott decided to get full script voice-over auditions from several Minneapolis voice talent agencies using people of various ages. As a test run for the actual session, I would rip the voice-over selects into Pro Tools and muck around to see which would be a better approach; cross-fading the older voices into the younger ones, or hard editing between each of the voice talents. Surprisingly, once I started tweaking, we came to the conclusion that the hard edits worked best.
On the day of the session, Greg Geitzenauer was the engineer and he followed through with an approach that we all had thought might work - he would let each voice-over talent hear the previous talent's full recording - once again going oldest to youngest. Then, he would have them mimic the feel and mood of that previous voice while they transitioned from that section into their own section and on into the next voice-over talent's section. This recording method created long "flaps" of overlap that let Greg seam together the voice transitions in unexpected places (mid-sentence, sometimes mid-word). This "trick" made the progressions less perceptible and gave some credence to the idea that this was the "voice" of Saint Josephs Hospital.
Now
that we had the voice-over talent
transitioning from old to young, we
needed to have that same effect occur
with the audio. Prior to the
session,
John
Lukas,
the latest member of our staff,
experimented with a recent plug-in
from
iZotope
called, "Vinyl" that has the ability to
produce "lo-fi" effects like dust, scratches,
warping, etc. It was a huge help to the radio
spot's production value as it let us
fabricate "sepia-toned" audio that was equal
parts
Matthew Brady
and
Thomas
Dolby.
We way love this thing.
The Minneapolis voice-over talent for this project were spot on too. In order of appearance they were: Irv Fink (any better way to imply history than to start off with an 80+ year old who's still razor sharp?), Mark Benninghofen (whose transformation from old to young in itself was impressive), Matt Guidry, and Kevin Dewey.
Even though trying to accomplish this kind of "time transitioning" sound-design can generate some serious head scratching, Michael J. Fox (as Marty McFly) put the proper spin on it 20 yrs ago - "If you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything."
Here's, "Timeline" for Saint Joseph's Hospital, produced by Kruskopf Coontz.
Irv Fink and Matt Guidry can be booked through Moore Creative Talent, inc. while Mark Benninghofen and Kevin Dewey can be booked through their agent, The Wehmann Agency.
Got a comment, rant or rave? Pleased click on the comments button below and let us know your thoughts.
Personally, we found it takes a little bit of time (no pun intended), ingenuity, new technology and a touch of luck.
First, some background...
Kruskopf Coontz, a Twin Cities ad agency with whom we do a lot of work, contacted us about a unique radio project for St. Josephs Hospital. Saint Joseph's, Minnesota's first hospital, has always been known for great patient care but people haven't typically thought of them for having advanced medical technology - even though they've been a leader in this field for years with innovative treatments like the CyberKnife. This is an incredible tool which allows them to do full body radiosurgery using image-guided robotics. In simpler terms, it's a highly accurate way of delivering radiation to specific places in the body without a lot of collateral damage to the surrounding tissue.
And I thought my iPod was cool.
Scott Jorgensen, the writer for this radio spot, thought that aurally displaying the time line might be the most innovative way to show that St. Joseph's has always been at the forefront of technology - and that they've been doing so for a long time. His question to me was, "can we easily create the effect of someone's voice going from very old to very young over the course of a minute". My response was, "Walgreens called. Your meds are in - sorry for the delay" With that, we went to work.
With the cost of an ISDN recording session being out of the question, Scott decided to get full script voice-over auditions from several Minneapolis voice talent agencies using people of various ages. As a test run for the actual session, I would rip the voice-over selects into Pro Tools and muck around to see which would be a better approach; cross-fading the older voices into the younger ones, or hard editing between each of the voice talents. Surprisingly, once I started tweaking, we came to the conclusion that the hard edits worked best.
On the day of the session, Greg Geitzenauer was the engineer and he followed through with an approach that we all had thought might work - he would let each voice-over talent hear the previous talent's full recording - once again going oldest to youngest. Then, he would have them mimic the feel and mood of that previous voice while they transitioned from that section into their own section and on into the next voice-over talent's section. This recording method created long "flaps" of overlap that let Greg seam together the voice transitions in unexpected places (mid-sentence, sometimes mid-word). This "trick" made the progressions less perceptible and gave some credence to the idea that this was the "voice" of Saint Josephs Hospital.

The Minneapolis voice-over talent for this project were spot on too. In order of appearance they were: Irv Fink (any better way to imply history than to start off with an 80+ year old who's still razor sharp?), Mark Benninghofen (whose transformation from old to young in itself was impressive), Matt Guidry, and Kevin Dewey.
Even though trying to accomplish this kind of "time transitioning" sound-design can generate some serious head scratching, Michael J. Fox (as Marty McFly) put the proper spin on it 20 yrs ago - "If you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything."
Here's, "Timeline" for Saint Joseph's Hospital, produced by Kruskopf Coontz.
Irv Fink and Matt Guidry can be booked through Moore Creative Talent, inc. while Mark Benninghofen and Kevin Dewey can be booked through their agent, The Wehmann Agency.
Got a comment, rant or rave? Pleased click on the comments button below and let us know your thoughts.