This summer, I was hired by the Santa Monica music house, HUM, to arrange the music for a national Hyundai/NCAA football campaign. As is often the case with commercial work, the timeline was very tight. The finished product features a voiceover by Jeff Bridges and a full marching band arrangement of “Saturday Night” by the Bay City Rollers.
Here is a common chain of command in these types of projects: the client (in this case, Hyundai) works with the marketing agency (Innocean) who contracted with the music house (HUM) who hired me as the composer/arranger to work on this project.
I received the call about the possibility of this project at the end of the day Tuesday, then received the green light a couple hours later. That night, I quickly arranged an abridged version of “Saturday Night” (by the Bay City Rollers) for collegiate marching band so that HUM could approve it by Wednesday morning. By mid-afternoon I was on a flight from Portland to Tucson where we we had two hours to learn, rehearse, and record the piece with the University of Arizona Marching band inside Arizona Stadium the following morning. No pressure.
It’s rewarding to see the finished product once all the great footage, editing, and voiceover (by Jeff Bridges) is applied to the finished product. Below is a short documentary produced by Innocean about the recording process, followed by two different versions of the spot.
