How SOFTSPOT’s Ryan Chun Embraced the Surreal in ‘Feel Your Music More’ for Bose
Bose’s latest campaign, ‘Feel Your Music More’, invites viewers to envision what it would feel to let beats and melodies take over their bodies completely. To visualise this enticing concept, the Bose team tapped SOFTSPOT’s director, Ryan Chun, trusting him to bridge the gap between reality and surrealism through his cinematic aesthetic.
Ryan notes that trust was vital to this campaign as he needed to capture a lot of different components in order to create the final, arresting whole. The campaign, made up of a short film and photography, was captured across six locations featuring six ‘characters’.
A lot of pre-production went into the campaign with Ryan exercising an extreme degree of precision when it came to location scouting. As the campaign looks to blur the lines between the world as we know it and a dream-like state, Ryan wanted to find physical locations that could provide his envisioned blocking capabilities in-camera. “We scouted for multiple days and with each place we visited I almost literally did a full test shoot,” he reveals. The final campaign is drenched in rich jewel tones and lifted by fluid choreography that transports viewers between different worlds, like the experience of being absorbed in one’s favourite songs.
For Ryan, this campaign is indicative of what can be achieved when everyone shares and believes in the same creative vision. “I think in our industry there’s a lot of jobs that start out with all the potential in the world but slowly get whittled down to be a fragment of what it started as. From the beginning we all saw that this one had the potential to be one of the special cases where that doesn’t happen, and it gave us all the more motivation to put our all into it.”
Today, LBB speaks to Ryan to find out how he brought Bose’s brief to life with his bold vision, the challenges of having an exacting eye, and translating the craft of music into video and still imagery.
LBB> Congratulations on this beautiful film and photographs. What was the initial brief, and how closely does it align with the finished campaign?
Ryan> When Bose reached out, the team knew they wanted this campaign to live in two separate worlds. A starting point that was set in reality within everyday settings, and a second that took place in a more abstracted and surreal world. The goal of this second world was to create an environment that visualises the experience of closing your eyes and surrendering to the music around you.
In responding to the brief we had to ask, when you’re completely absorbed by the music, where do you go? What does it look like to let yourself be inundated by the sounds around you? What does it sound like?
They had this really powerful experience to tap into, but they were looking for partners who would be able to help them bridge those two worlds together and visualise that. To figure out how to take a very internalised and sensorial experience and project it onto a screen.
LBB> Colour feels like it was an important part of your vision. Is that fair to say, and if so why did you want to make that such a focal point?
Ryan> To figure out how to approach this, the first step was to outline how the worlds overlapped. I kept coming back to the idea of context. As we stripped down the context of reality and moved into the abstract, some elements had remained consistent throughout.
In motion work there are so many more tools to achieve this. You can shift perspective through camera movement or lighting cues, or the way pictures or sounds shift between cuts. But we had to define a way for this to work in our stills as well. Colour was a huge part of achieving that for us.
We tapped into the idea that if we start in an office lined with green curtains or a hill on the grass, as the talent surrenders into that track all those details would fall away. Blades of grass disappear and instead that green hue shifts from a literal object into more of a visceral feeling. A texture that bends and wraps around us. The feeling of the original environment is still there, that colour remains, but the context is removed.
LBB> And did you use any kind of practical visual tricks on-set to establish the deep colours we see in the finished work?
Ryan> I wanted to get these as close as possible in camera, so to do that we set some pretty strict parameters to how we scouted. I’d show up with a small point and shoot and literally try to shoot the concept on the spot. Were the colours we needed naturally present, were the textures needed to bend reality, and if not was there a way to make it so they were? For example, we found the laundromat right away and instantly fell in love with the geometry of the space, but we needed to be able to bring in more warmer tones. So instead of scouting a new place, we changed it into the world we were after and applied a yellow tint to every window; that totally transformed the colour world of the environment.
LBB> Taken as a whole, the campaign is kaleidoscopic - not just with colour but also the different visuals ranging from nature to urban scenes. How do you tie all that variety together in a way that feels conducive?
Ryan> I think movement and posing was a big part of this. We wanted to acknowledge the idea that this experience of surrendering to the music can happen no matter where you are.
Even though we had six talents in six different locations, I wanted to be able to grab the video playhead, scrub through the film and have it all feel like it’s all one singular experience. So for the film, the choreography was a big staple to keeping that sense of continuity as we transitioned through each environment.
For the stills, I wanted that consistency to come through in their expressions and poses. There were tons of different lighting scenarios, environments, and colour palettes, but I wanted each to share the same feeling. In pulling the final selects, I literally printed out every photo and laid them all out. I’d piece through and rearrange them until they all felt like they were all showing the same emotion
LBB> The artful photography wouldn't look out of place on a gallery wall. Why do you think this work is such a good fit for Bose as a brand?
Ryan> I think it comes down to what Bose does as a company. Sure, they sell products like every other brand, but if you really get down to it they’re providing you the ability to access an experience. To experience art and energy and emotion and bring you to a world a musician has dedicated their life to sharing with you.
There’s so much beauty and craft in music, and to truly capture the core of what this was all about, the approach to the creation of those images felt like it should be made with just as much passion and excitement behind it. To me it was less of a product shoot and more of a chance to participate in that artistic creativity.
LBB> The campaign blurs the line between art and advertising. From a creative standpoint, how do you find a way to tell a clear product story in such a beautifully-composed but abstract way?
Ryan> This entire project came down to trust. It’s rare to get to say this, but I wouldn’t change a single thing about final images from this campaign even if it had been a passion project. The Bose team totally scrapped the boundaries and red tape of a normal campaign shoot and trusted me to push as far as I could. The word ‘no’ didn’t exist on this project. Instead it was ‘how.’
LBB> How did you figure out the locations for each shoot? The array of laundry machines is especially striking for example, like endless rows of submarine windows. How does that all come together once you've seen a location?
Ryan> Like I mentioned earlier, the requirements of these locations were incredibly demanding. They had to fit the blocking of the video, look beautiful in a ‘reality’ photo, then have the ability to shift and warp into the abstract. We digitally scouted 50+ locations and went frame by frame through every single angle. Once we found the most promising, we scouted another dozen in person.
Especially for the abstract worlds, the angles we needed couldn’t come from a digital scout. We scouted for multiple days and with each place we visited I almost literally did a full test shoot. I’d walk around for two hours with a camera, a stand in, and a pair of headphones and exhaust every single angle. I waited to make our final selections until I knew I could shoot the campaign without any team or lights and get it 80% of the way there.
LBB> What was the most challenging aspect of the project, and how did you overcome it?
Ryan> I think it was the sheer volume of what we needed to capture. We had two products, six talents, six locations, and were looking for each scenario to exist in our two-three different ‘worlds’ that required us to completely transform the lighting and blocking. I think the final maths came out to roughly 18 set ups in two days.
The only reason we pulled any of this off is because of the dedication and trust of our team and their commitment to the creative behind the campaign. Our line producer Theresa didn’t sleep for days and went on endless scouts with me. Our cinematographer, Austin Kearns, practically moved into my apartment for the week leading up.
We sat down and plotted out every location, move, lighting change, and angle to find the most efficient way to pull this off. There were so many reasons to say we couldn’t pull something off but everyone was so committed to maintaining our vision for this that we found a way at every turn.
LBB> Is there anything that you'd do differently if you had your time again?
Ryan> Unless we were able to add a day or two to our shoot I wouldn’t change a thing. We built a team made up of friends and people we trust. People who we knew would care about this project as much as we did. Everyone was fully committed beginning to end.
I think in our industry there’s a lot of jobs that start out with all the potential in the world but slowly get whittled down to be a fragment of what it started as. From the beginning we all saw that this one had the potential to be one of the special cases where that doesn’t happen, and it gave us all the more motivation to put our all into it.
LBB> How have you found the reaction to the campaign so far?
Ryan> I was completely absorbed by this project for weeks and weeks. When you’re so deep in a project and care so much about maintaining that vision you’re gripping onto every tiny minute detail. You’re so in the weeds and get so consumed with it that by the end it feels like it’s all you’ve ever known. By the end I knew I was excited with how it turned out but was just so familiar with everything. On set or in post, a crew member or our editor Emilie [Aubry] would speak with such excitement over certain aspects that to me had become so matter of fact. Almost as if the ideas had become so ingrained that I had forgotten certain things might be special. Those comments, and once we had finally put it out, the texts or emails or conversations with friends, took me by total surprise. Their reactions reminded me of how worthwhile all the work and dedication we had put into this project was.
