It happened about fifteen years ago, when I had just quit the big downtown studio and was starting on my own, and my 'facility' was a couple of Revox decks on a sawhorse-and-door table in my attic. The ad agency for New England Telephone (now Verizon) asked me to drop by.
They were going to produce a 7-spot TV campaign, a dramatic series about a high-tech startup, with each spot highlighting a different business service the phone company provides. They wanted to simultaneously develop it as radio. It would involve working on the scripts with their TV writer, and flying to Hollywood to direct the TV principals in two half-day sessions. They'd pay travel and talent, and offered me X dollars for everything else. Would I care to participate?
Would I?!!
Here's some of the nifty things I was allowed to do on this campaign, both to save money and to keep the creative standards high...
Most of the spots took place in two locations: the start-up, and the bigger company it spun off from. So I broke the seven spots into scenes depending on location, and recorded one "office" on the first day and the other on the next. This meant the expensive Hollywood talent would get their proper AFTRA use payments, but nobody was kept waiting for their scenes (and running up extra session hours). The only exception was a couple of phone calls between the two companies. I had the actors from both locations show up for those, so they could play off each other. We also tweaked the copy so that some scripts implied characters that weren't actually in that spot, saving on use fees.
Recording out of sequence also kept me in charge of the emotional flow, so there was an arc to the entire 7-spot story. If the actors had been allowed to perform each :60 in its entirety, there's a good chance the campaign wouldn't have hung together. This way, it was more like a 7-minute drama about two businesses (with a lot of product placement for the phone company, of course).
For the phone conversations, I had the studio set up an isolation booth in the main room. One character would be in the room, the other in the booth... and they could hear each other only through headphones. Then I had their engineer patch a phone filter into the headphone feed. The filter helped the performances, and the isolation made it easier for me to edit the conversation or change step-ons. (I recorded each actor to a separate track without filters, for freedom to change the point of view in the mix.)
Speaking of step-ons: I recorded each scene fat, a couple of seconds longer than would fit the final mix. Then I overlapped voices to imply these high-powered executives were getting more and more excited. There's a lot of emotion in some of the scenes. So I gave the actors permission to stop, center themselves, and then shout at each other - something rarely done in radio. The payoff, at the end of the last spot, requires the entire start-up's staff to whoop it up when they hear their company will survive (thanks to careful use of telephones). Normally in a case like this, actors make eye contact and then cheer simultaneously when everybody in the room is ready. I wanted it to sound more spontaneous, so I gave each character a specific cheer. Then, from the control room, I held them back with my hand and then suddenly cued them. Each person reacted slightly differently, giving the overall reaction a genuine feel.
I recorded less important characters at a small music studio in Boston, using the same techniques. (I also cast the agency's TV producer and my wife - both AFTRA members - in minor roles. Every little bit helps.)
To save money on music, we didn't hire a composer to score seven :60 spots. Instead, I commissioned a bunch of cues - some only a couple of seconds long, others longer pads or sweeping variations on the client's jingle. It was a total of about two minutes of music. All the cues were related, so I could mix them or build one over another. If you listen to all seven spots in a row you can spot some cues repeating, but always in different musical contexts.
Eventide had just introduced their first Ultra-Harmonizer, the H3000. One of its features was the ability to fine-tune very real-sounding reverbs to match specific kinds of rooms and store the result. I rented one for this project and created two reverbs: one with concrete floors and bare walls for the start-up, the other with plush carpeting and drapes for the established company. Almost every scene has one or the other, giving the spots a boom-miked TV feel. A couple of the more emotional scenes are dry, for intimacy.
Other than the Eventide everything was analog. I edited takes on one of my Revoxes, then rented a room with an MCI 8-track to build and mix. And it was mono to save tracks for the overlaps and crowd scenes - you could get away with that, in those days.
I wasn't there when the agency presented the spots to the phone company. Later, the account executive called to say they'd bought the campaign. He told me "They said this isn't just the best radio we've ever done; it's the best radio we've ever heard."
Maybe, some day, I'll get to do something like that again.