That Time We Scored for Halo and Won Cannes ( a.k.a. Bringing Throwback Back #tbt )

I’ve scored music for so many commercials in my career that sometimes I forget them. Not because I didn’t love what I did or anything like that. It’s just that I have one of those leaky brains. The drummer and bassist in my rock band remember chords for me that I forget in songs that I have written. It gets that way sometimes. I’m often asked what is my favorite track that I have composed for a commercial. My answer surprises people when I tell them that it is a little known Sheetz convenience store radio track called “Dinner Dinner”. But that is just a simple answer because there are so many. “Dinner” is certainly among my favorites, but I’ve never been much of a ‘list” guy – as in: Top 10 Favorite Movies / Artists / Albums / Songs / whatever – that is just not how I am wired. If you want to narrow it down with various criteria though, such as what tracks have won the biggest awards and got the most national / international recognition, I can define that more clearly. And that brings us to Halo.

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I had meant a producer with some creatives at Y & R in San Francisco who had said to me, “we hear the emotion in your compositions. We will keep you in mind for future work when something feels right.”? About a year later that producer was working at T.A.G. McCann (also San Francisco) and called with a possible job. The creatives had just shot the famous “Halo 3 / Believe” campaign with the sprawling diorama using a piece of Chopin music. They had shot some behind-the-scenes video of workers creating the figures and models for the diorama and had been considering assembling a ‘how it was made’ video. But then they had a revelation and decided to turn the ‘making of’ video footage into a bigger fantastical story about a ‘Museum of Humanity’ that housed a monument to a battle fought in the future. They said they would send the video rough cut to me that had a scratch voice over and a lot of black holes in it waiting to be filled, and see if I wanted to write a score for it. I don’t play video games, and while I surely have geeky things that I do, and ‘geek out’ on plenty of niches and topics, the video they sent to me seemed just way TOO geeky for me to get my heart into. I was flummoxed. I told Rebecca Senneway – V.P. here at Big Science, that I wasn’t sure if I could feel anything for this extreme nerd-fest of a video. She said something like: “It’s Bungee – HALO! You get down in your room and FIND some feeling for it!”? Haha. And I did. I know the team gave me about 5 words. I don’t recall them all but surely Anthemic, Heroic, Timeless, and Melancholy, may well have been among them. I set out writing straight away and came up with 2 demo tracks which we sent to the team in California. The creative director, John Patroulis , called me from an edit suite and said that they loved one of the demos. They had dropped it into picture and were working with it but that they would like me to change something. I had used an acoustic guitar as the main melody instrument and that felt too American / Western for them. They wanted the piece to be timeless and asked that I change that instrument but keep the melody and feel. I loved that they could understand the nuances and appreciate the demo as wet clay, not kiln dried. I had the guitar line charted for violin in a low octave – raspy fiddle range. That did the trick swimmingly. I also brought in a bagpiper to play through one of the verses in place of the violin to give it a more mystical, open feel for one of the sections. The rest of it is hyper-processed electric guitar through t.c. electronic fireworx and some other samples, drones, and instruments. TMI? I don’t recall the rest, I’m sure there were some tweaks in final post. Months later the producer, Vince Genovese , called to let me know that we’d won Cannes Grand Prix Gold Lion, sharing top billing from the festival that year with the Cadbury Gorilla drummer spot. One Show Gold Pencils were also procured (and feel amazing in your hand).

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Since then I have written, and continue to write music for innumerable spots, flavoring messages that are National, Regional, and Local. ?I always put all of the feels into every single one.

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? Other members of the T.A.G. McCann team were Nate Able, Tim Steir, and Hannah Murray, Rick Herrera, Mat Bunnell, and Scott Duchon. Apologies to anyone I missed. It has been a minute.

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p.s. – I have been telling myself to feature some past compositions in a #tbt format for years. Current work etc. takes precedent, but I will attempt to do more in the future. Thanks for reading.

See and hear the complete video here. https://www.bigsciencemusic.com/project/halo-3-for-all-of-us/

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