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MillimeterCinema Commercial Mix
Aug 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By David John Farinella
Cinema commercials are not only controversial, but they also present new challenges to audio professionals. Extra Mile, a new campaign for Hyundai's Sonata, includes three 30-second television spots and a 60-second theatrical commercial. For each spot, mixer Peter Rincon of POP Sound, Santa Monica, Calif., blended music, sound design, and voiceover tracks. According to Rincon, creating the 5.1 mix for the 60-second theatrical spot was the most complex part Extra Mile's audio work. For instance, a narrator's track that would typically be placed in the center speaker was instead spread across the left and right channels.
Mixing the narrator to a phantom center on the Extra Mile theatrical spot gave cinema audiences a more immersive experience.
“It created a phantom center and gave [the narrator] that omnipresent feel,” Rincon says. “I also dialed him slightly, not to any weird degree, back in the room a little bit. It certainly wasn't quadraphonic, nor was it like a guy talking from the back of the room — it just set sort of a feeling.”
The decision to push the narrator tracks across the spectrum, Rincon adds, was influenced by Santa Monica-based Primal Scream's music tracks, which he characterizes as “lush and evocative.”
“In the 5.1 mix,” Rincon says, “we were able to wrap that soundtrack throughout the room, to really immerse the listener in that music track. We did a true 5.1 music mix for this spot, and I didn't want the announcer to be this lone mono element blasting through the center speaker. I wanted him to be a presence in the room, much like the music tracks. It really works because he felt like a part of the sonic landscape.”
One of the project's challenges involved balancing Stephen Dewey's (Machine Head, Venice, Calif.) realistic sound design elements against Rincon's more stylized tracks.
“We ended up balancing those sound effects to varying degrees, and going back and forth a bit with the agency,” he says. “They wanted to get the feel that they wanted because the footage of the automobile that they showed was ultra-stylized. The footage was really well done. It wasn't radically different — it just had a look that screamed for this kind of slightly off-centered approach to sound.”
To put the mix together, Rincon used a combination of Digidesign Pro Tools, an AMS Neve AudioFile workstation, and an AMS Neve MMC console.
“I'm trying to lead the movement away from that single workstation approach,” he explains. “I really believe that the idea of a single workstation doing everything in the session limits your speed and your flexibility, the amount of tracks that you can work on, and limits the amount of tasks that you can do at the same time.”
On the Hyundai spots, for instance, he was able to load an OMF file into Pro Tools while his assistant lined up sound effects tracks in the AudioFile system.
“It allowed us to multitask, in a nutshell, and for two workstations to be preparing tracks and editing tracks at the same time,” he says.
It's a philosophy that Rincon says he will continue to promulgate while working on other high-end, theatrical spots — a form of advertising that he believes will continue to grow in popularity.
“That should challenge all of us to present material that people look at and don't think is a typical commercial,” he says. “I could understand not wanting to see commercials in a theatrical venue, but if you make them entertaining enough, and you give it that big-screen flavor in sound and content, I think people would enjoy it.”
