About a week ago, in the afternoon, I got a call from one of the studios I work with, and they said they had a couple of quick projects for me. One of them was for this commercial for KFC. The kicker was, they needed the music ASAP (sounds quite familiar in my line of work), but this time they really needed it because the commercial was being rushed out. "No problemo" were the words that came out of my mouth, even though I had to catch a flight at 6 am the next morning, and I hadn't even done the laundry much less pack my bags. Another thing the studio didn't know was, I actually had another ongoing project with another studio that had needed some adjustments to the music. No matter, being in my line of work, I have to be ready to work at the drop of a hat, so more often than not, I would always say "yes" to work, and then really worry about getting it done.
I had some errands to run on that day so I quickly got those done, while the studio sent me the "picture" (video of the commercial) for me to get a quick look at it. The moment I got home in the early evening, I started working on the adjustments for the other commercial. After a few hours of sending music files and getting more feedback and additional adjusting, it was time for me to work on the KFC commercial. You know the saying, "Time flies when you're having fun?" Well I realized time really flies by even when you're working hard, as evidenced by my surprise at seeing that it was now 1 am in the morning! Only 5 hours till it was time for me to get a cab to the airport! And laundry wasn't done yet! Was it time to press the PANIC button?
The music brief for the KFC project was something orchestral that had a sense of wonder and mystery. Strangely enough, the ideas came through pretty fast, much to my chagrin. In about 1.5 hours the music was done, and mixed. Maybe I work better after doing laundry.
I was asked to do a little change to the music towards the end when the product shot came into view, to highlight the product even more.
Here is the commercial:
After shutting down my home studio, I just had enough time to grab my laundry from the dryer and pack some of the clothes before calling a cab to get to the airport, with no time nor sleep to spare. It has been quite a while since I had to work overnight on music, and it's nice to be back in this situation once in a while.
I was also pretty amused to find out from the studio that when the music was presented to the client, the client asked the studio if they grabbed the music from some big name movie, and they had to be reassured that it was an original composed piece. I'm pretty glad that this project turned out fine despite the panic that I had felt earlier. Thankfully this is a project that was worth losing sleep over.