- Product/Brand - Thomson Holidays
- Spot - Simon The Ogre
- Song Title - Beethoven's 5 Secrets
- Composer - Tedder, Beethoven
- Publisher - Sony/ATV EMI Music
- Artist - The Piano Guys
- Record Company - Sony Music
- Music Supervisor - Platinum Rye, Adelphoi Music
- Ad Agency - BMB
- Creative - Gavin McGrath, Christopher Keatinge, Dan Bennett
- Film Company - Sonny London
- Film Director - Frederik Bond
- Post Production - Realise Studio
- Air Date - December 27 2013
They say that Simon The Ogre is the biggest thing the holiday market has ever seen. And they could well be right.
The mini-movie, scripted by BMB Creative Christopher Keatinge and directed by Swedish American Frederik Bond, has also been described as a milestone for the category on account of its use of state-of-the-art prosthetic, motion capture and cgi technologies.
It tells the story of Simon, a salary man worn down by the pressures of work and so disconnected from his wife and family that he believes he has become a monster in their eyes.
Like a modern fairytale, it’s only through the calming effect of a Thomson Holiday that the fearsome giant is restored to his true identity and everybody lives happily ever after. Or at least for the two weeks they spend on a beach resort in Crete.
Given the complexity of the production it would probably be stretching a point to say that almost as much work went into choosing the soundtrack as in shooting the film. But for Platinum Rye Associate Director David Bass, it was certainly a time-consuming process which began back in August 2013, some weeks before cast and crew gathered on set in London.
“The initial brief was very simple,” he says. “The music had to make the viewer feel emotionally connected to Simon. The creatives knew that they wanted crescendos in certain places but overall the music needed to forge a link with the character.”
After a series of typically exhaustive – or should that be exhausting - searches which explored existing tracks, re-records and bespoke scores to picture, Bass ended up with a shortlist of around a dozen pieces “some with vocals and some without, all different but all achieving the same feeling.”
But it was director Frederik Bond who suggested using something by the Piano Guys.
Not particularly well-known in the UK, the pairing of Jon Schmidt (piano) and Steven Sharp Nelson (cello) became a huge You Tube phenomenon in the US with offbeat videos of their classical arrangements of pop tunes like The Turtles Happy Together, Coldplay’s Paradise and Adele’s Rolling In The Deep as well as more populist adaptations of revered repertoire by such as Rachmaninov, Bach and Mozart.
The Piano Guys’ eponymous debut album for Sony’s Masterworks imprint reached Number One on the Billboard New Age and Classical Albums chart in 2012 and featured a selection of pop and classical mash-ups including a version of OneRepublic’s 2010 single Secrets subtly interlaced with four different melodies lifted from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.
Thus the title of the piece – Beethoven’s 5 Secrets – which Platinum Rye finally licensed into the Thomson campaign.
But the job didn’t stop there. Slotting the music smoothly into the four differing cuts (120”, 60”, 30” and 20”) and getting it to meet the specific hit points throughout each version of the finished film proved to be another task altogether.
And for that BMB turned to Adelphoi Music whose Dan Kreeger tells of “several very late nights and some highly technical jiggery-pokery” before Simon The Ogre was ready for broadcast.
As we head into the awards ceremony season, it will be good to see whether everybody's efforts will be rewarded with a rosette or two. But Simon The Ogre is surely one holiday ad which won't go unrecognised!
