Gillette were making a film about the evolution of shaving fashions over the past 100 years to promote their new body razor. They filmed their hero character transition through stop motion animation from one era to the next shaving the latest fashions through the 1910s to the 2010s whilst he went through seemless costume changes. We were asked to write a single piece of music to cover the evolution of popular music over the past 100 years to reflect the action on screen. And, we had to start writing before the commercial was shot.
After extensive research we chose a tempo that could work over 10 different styles of music that we felt could work together chronologically, musically and reflect the clothing and facial hair worn by the Hero on screen as he evolved. Writing sections to equal Measures we wrote a skeleton track of drums and bass tracking patterns that were typical of each era. The client loved it and asked us to proceed with finishing the piece.
We then built arrangement layers for each section using simple instrumentation to instantly reinforce each era musically and help tell the story as there was no VoiceOver for most of the spot.
The edit changed considerably over the course of the project which meant that structural changes were needed to keep up with the sync points. Because we had written to an even tempo we were able to edit away from equal Measures and tie eras together musically and to picture without any trouble.
Late in the day we were asked to incorporate the classic Gillette tune so we tweaked the musical structure of the piece at the end and incorporated it neatly.
It was one of our most challenging project yet, but also one of the most rewarding ones - racking up over a million hits per day in the first week on YouTube.
You can see the spot on YouTube here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h16y4m2TJsg
You can also see a making of video for the visual side of things here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cf0MVr6BTKw
Thanks for considering us.