Those of you who think doing TV commercial jingle music might not drive you insane... THINK AGAIN!
Several years back, I had a gig doing a TV commercial jingle, here in Japan. The product? Disposable diaper pants! What a shitty gig! Har har har!
But seriously... the commercial opened with 3 moms, all busy changing their baby's diapers, and they're saying: "These diapers suck! Wish we had disposable
pants-type diapers for our infants!" Then, POW! ZING! The product appears! Mommies and babies are happy and excited! The commercial ends with the product name: "Mamy Poco Pants!"
And there's the rub. The client was fine with the music that I came up with, straightaway. But the agony had only begun. The quality and tone and personality of the product-name sound bite, THAT was something they just couldn't make up their minds about. Endless meetings, endless emails... "Make it more exciting! Make it more playful! Make it more Japanese sounding! Make it less Japanese sounding! Try singing it! Make it sound like a crowd! Make it... sigh. It was a very particular kind of hell. That grown men in suits would spend that kind of time and psychic energy on such minutiae, that they could have that hard a time deciding on what these three gaddam words should sound like... it was enough to make you want to just drop music and go into the retread tire business. Or start a campaign of genocide against advertising executives.
Anyway, there are 8 versions here, for your listening, um, pleasure. And that ain't all of 'em. There were at least 5 or 6 more, that I haven't included. There's really only so much I could bring myself to subject you good people to.
By the way, my wife (the sound bite vocalist on this magnificent gig) still can't even bear to listen to this, lo these many years later. Some things are just too painful to revisit.
For a few years I was an assistant editor of TV commercials and it was identical to how you describe it. I would sit for hours with suited Pantene clients showing the "final" cut of the commercial over and over as they fussed and flip-flopped over how the shot of the fucking vitamins penetrating the hair follicle should be 1/10th of a second longer or whatever, change everything around, change it again, and again, only to revert back to my original cut 3 hours later. All while they pigged out on the trays of food that I, being the assistant, had gotten for them. God forbid you had any plans for the evening or weekend; cancelled. I remember having to call friends and cancel on them because I had to stay late to compile reels of "hair acrobatics," going through hours of tape of those slow-motion shots of beautiful, shiny hair falling in different scenarios.
I've said before that working in film and tv killed any desire I had left in me to actually make films, and it's funny that you've posted this because I've recently been thinking of looking into jingle-writing. But now you've frightened me. I'd hate to start hating music, too.
posted by chococat at 2:15 PM on May 23, 2009 [1 favorite]