NEW YORK - Composer Ravi Krishnaswami and sound designer Peter Rundquist of music and sound design house Sacred Noise (www.sacrednoise.com) took a deliberately unconventional path to create the tension-filled soundtrack of Chrome Couture, Cadillac's latest spot promoting its new 2007 Escalade sport utility vehicle. The commercial marks the first time in years that the car maker has not used what?s become its signature soundtrack - Led Zeppelin's "Rock and Roll."
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Leo Burnett, Detroit conceived the commercial, which was directed by Jeffrey Plansker of production company Supply & Demand. The spot aired during the second quarter of Super Bowl XL.
Chrome Couture is set during a futuristic fashion show in which everything in the environment seems to be bathed in a metallic chrome hue. As anticipation for the new line-up builds the scene is interrupted by the harsh, reverberated sound of camera flashes. The fashion show unfolds to an other-worldly soundtrack of post-modern loop fragments and insistent bells, as a model rises out of a pool of liquid chrome. The spot ends with the new Escalade emerging from the chrome pool while the audience - and the music - catches its breath in a moment of wonder.
For Krishnaswami, the challenge of scoring the spot was to stand out from the more traditional Super Bowl commercials. "There are a lot of conventional ways to create tension with music but I wanted to stay far away from those and create something more avant-garde, exciting and new."
Krishnaswami achieved that by choosing a lithophone as the score's central instrument. The instrument is similar to a xylophone, and consists of a series of hand-carved stones that are tuned to different pitches and played with mallets.
The commercial was cut in :60 and :30 versions by Noah Herzog of Rock Paper Scissors in Los Angeles. Visual effects were created by London's The Mill with Aron Hjartarson serving as VFX 3D supervisor, Westley Sarokin as lead Flame artist, and Asher Edwards as 3D operations manager.