“Extraordinary starts from nothing, and takes everything.”

What does nothing sound like? What does extraordinary sound like? Wouldn’t it be cool to write the music using only the dialogue from the script?

When Crystal Pix producer/director Don Casper approached me about creating a custom music track for the opening video to the 2012 Addy Awards these were the thoughts running through my head. We have a brand new audio suite at Crystal Pix and this was a great opportunity to break it in. I pitched the idea to Don and he passed it by the client, Joe Mayernik at StormFrog. Everyone was on board but wondering what the music would sound like? To be honest I didn’t know. I had an idea in mind but wasn’t certain it could work. I was anxious to get started and figure out a way to pull it off.

After a few days of research, testing new Pro Tools plug-ins, and a few false starts I decided to use the tools I already knew to sketch out the idea for the song. I roughed in the beat, just a kick drum and high hat. Then the bass line happened. The song now had an anchor and some substance I could build around. At this point I knew the idea would work.

Once I had the skeleton of the song I replaced sonic ideas with bits of dialogue, morphing them into the music I was hearing. The “d” from “the birthplace of the idea” transformed into the kick drum. The “ts” from “that pure moment when we’ve got nothing but our guts” made a great high hat. Mixing in triple “n”s from “command n” and a melody line built from “and has no fear” the “The Manifesto of Extraordinary” had an awesome music bed. All anchored together by an “Extraordinary starts from nothing, and takes everything” bass line.

Listen to the final music track.

All that remained was to sound design the explosion and some typing effects for the intro/outro.

• 1 sonic boom
• 1 section of violins
• 6 oscillators
• 1 “Everything starts from nothing” morphing into a heart beat
• 1 “and takes everything” morphing into low end sub sonic “wind”
• 1 stereo track of pink noise

Those are the ingredients to an explosion of creativity.

All in all a successful piece that really embraced the challenge of starting from nothing and creating something extraordinary.

Watch the final video, which was presented on an 80 foot video wall!