Press Release

Music and Sound Design house Sacred Noise and composer Ravi Krishnaswami and sound designer Peter Rundquist took a deliberately unconventional path to create the tension-filled soundtrack of "Chrome Couture," the new spot for the Cadillac Escalade created by Leo Burnett, Detroit and directed by Jeffrey Plansker of production company Supply & Demand, bicoastal.The spot aired during the secnd quarter of the Super Bowl.
Click here to watch Super Bowl spot "Chrome Culture"
"Everyone involved with this project ‘ the creative team, the director ‘ were interested in doing something different, something that broke the mold," said Michael Montes, Sacred Noise Creative Director. "This project offered us a great opportunity to bring some of our more experimental passions to our commercial work."
Set during a futuristic fashion show in which everything in the environment seems to be bathed in a metallic chrome hue, "Chrome Couture" begins with the sound of hushed murmurs from an excited audience. As the tension builds, the scene is interrupted by the harsh, reverberated sound of camera flashes. As the fashion show unfolds to an other-worldly soundtrack of post-modern loop fragments and insistent bells, a model rises out of a pool of liquid chrome much to the astonishment of the fashionable crowd, including models Rachel Hunter and Vida Guerra, ex-NFL running back Marcus Allen and rapper Jadakiss.
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. As the car is revealed, the bells resolve dramatically and forcefully, accompanied by raw and powerful drumming that rises with the car. After a final breath, a last camera's flash echoes as the music trails off.
For Krishnaswami the essential challenge of scoring the spot was to stand out from the more traditional Super Bowl fare. "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. Similar to the glockenspiel or xylophone, a lithophone consists of a series of hand-carved stones that are tuned to different pitches and played with mallets.
"As a writer I tried to leave my comfort zone by starting with an instrument that I've never used before, " said Krishnaswami. "The way it is played, in a very aggressive tremolo style, seemed to create tension and wonder without falling into expected, cinematic clichà©s."
He added, "It's not often that the most 'out there' musical idea is the one that gets chosen for a big national spot, let alone a Super Bowl spot. Sometimes creativity gets watered down, but in this case the agency creative team did a great job of collaborating with us to push the music even further. Everyone was focused on creating a startling piece of music that would grab viewers' attention from the first frame and I think we achieved that."
Credits
Agency: Leo Burnett, Detroit, MI
Executive Creative Director: Tor Myhren
Creative Directors: Don McKinney, Will Perry
Copywriter: Jeff Cruz
Art Director: Brad Mancuso
Director of Broadcast Production: John Van Osdol
Production Company: Supply & Demand, Los Angeles, CA and New York, NY
Director: Jeffrey Plansker
Director of Photography: Neil Shapiro
Production Designer: Carl Swanberg
Executive Producer: Jack Nelson
Producers: Simon Barrett, Alicia Powers
Production Supervisor: Aasha Mullen
Editorial: Rock Paper Scissors, Los Angeles, CA
Editor: Noah Herzog
Visual Effects: The Mill, London
VFX 3D Supervisor: Aron Hjartarson
Lead Flame Artist: Westley Sarokin
3-D Operations Manager: Asher Edwards
Music/Sound Design: Sacred Noise, New York, NY
Creative Director: Michael Montes
Composer: Ravi Krishnaswami
Sound Design: Ravi Krishnaswami/Peter Rundquist
Executive Producer: Jason Menkes