Pollen Music Group is a San Francisco-based music collective comprised of songwriters, composers, producers, and audio visionaries, which aims to create authentic music and impactful sound design for advertising, TV, film, VR, and games. Its three principals -- Alexis Harte, Scot Stafford and JJ Wiesler -- deftly leap from lead to support roles according to the creative and technical needs of each project. Most recently, Pollen Music Group scored the music for Patrick Osborne’s Google Spotlight Story, Pearl, which made cinematic history as the first VR project to receive an Oscar nomination (2017 Best Animated Short). This year, Pearl took home the Emmy for Outstanding Innovation in Interactive Programming. Pearl's score, based on their original song, "No Wrong Way Home" also won a 2016 Annie Award, a Proto Award, and a Ciclope Award, and is a hefty contender for the Grammys this year. Available on BandCamp, Pollen is donating the proceeds of the track from Pearl to the Grammy’s official charity, MusiCares.
I really admire their balance of technological prowess and creative intuition that enables them to suceed in the audio side of the burgeoning field of immersive storytelling. Check out a behind the scenes of the music from Pearl below, and then read on below to learn more about Pollen.
What projects are you currently working on? Which are airing or about to release?
Scot: We’re about to release two more Google Spotlight Stories - first up is Son of Jaguar by Jorge Gutierrez, and soon after is Sonaria, one that I directed with Chromosphere and Kevin Dart. Another is in the works; it’s too early to mention, but very exciting. Two from Baobab studio -- both directed by Eric Darnell -- are very close: Asteroids and Rainbow Crow. Pollen is also working on some pretty interesting audio tech we wish we could talk about, but can’t!
How did you find out that you landed the Pearl gig, and what were your first thoughts?
Alexis: Early on, we really did not know what sort of musical role we would have in Pearl. Because we had either scored and/or sound-supervised all previous Google Spotlight Stories, we figured we would at least get to mix and perhaps sound design it. Because the director, Patrick Osborne knew that Pearl would be based on a song, the first task was to do a song search based on an animatic he had put together. In addition to finding and commissioning about a dozen songs from local and national artists that Patrick admired, we slipped in a few that we had written. We did a blind taste test with him in our studio and he eventually gravitated towards “No Wrong Way Home.” At that point, we got to dive in full bore!
Had you tried out 360 video or virtual reality before working on Pearl?
Scot: Pearl was actually the sixth Spotlight Story we worked on. The first 360 project was Windy Day, directed by Jan Pinkava - that was a mind-blower with lots of firsts - and each of the following kept building on that as the format, tools and devices matured. Duet, directed by Glen Keane, brought orchestral music and truly gorgeous hand-drawn animation into interactive 360 for the first time, and Justin Lin’s Help! was our first deep-dive into Ambisonics, which later became a VR standard. On Shannon Tindle’s On Ice, we blended stereo music, sound objects, and Ambisonic sound fields for the first time, which laid all of the groundwork for everything we did on Pearl. It’s been amazing to not only get to help pioneer these formats with such talented teams, but to then have a chance to apply everything we’ve learned on the next project, right away. It’s an insane ride that just keeps going.
What was your proudest moment of working on this project?
Alexis: It was amazing to learn at 6 a.m. back in January that Pearl had been nominated for an Oscar. That said, the proudest moment for me was observing folks’ reactions at the Tribeca Film Festival Interactive Lounge, where Pearl premiered on the Vive. Watching grown men (fathers especially) remove the Vive and quickly wipe their tears away with their sleeves made me think we had made something quite good.
In Pearl there is a bit of sound design, dialogue and fx overlapping the score -- did you work on that part of the sound as well? Is there a dialogue involved?
Scot: The overall sound of Pearl is dominated by the song, but there’s a pretty rich and dynamic blend between song, sound design, and dialogue throughout. Patrick wanted a vérité feel, almost like the film was “shot” in the world he created. There’s a ton of dialogue, but it doesn’t play a crucial narrative role. It’s more about putting the audience in each scene in a way that feels immersive and authentic. Our lead sound designer Jamey Scott did an extraordinary job and played a big role in making the “real” world of Pearl come to life. He co-mixed the theatrical version, and we took that and applied it to the interactive mix you hear in VR, which really became its own thing. Seeing what works in 2D versus in VR in the same project is endlessly fascinating.
Alexis, you have a history as a touring musician. Who was your favorite person to collaborate with in that world or share the stage with? How does your past experience in that world inform your approach to composing?
Alexis: Because I grew up listening to him, sharing a bill with Taj Mahal at the Fillmore was a highlight for me. Spending a good chunk of time on stage is really important for any songwriter, as it gives you an instantaneous read if your work is connecting with the audience. The best performers exude total confidence because they know the songs have no weak links, no dull moments. If you never leave your studio, you can lose sight of what makes a song work on a visceral level.
JJ, how does your background in engineering and acoustics play into Pollen's work? Did it come into play for this particular project?
JJ: When I studied mechanical engineering, I focused on acoustics, thinking I wanted to build speakers or work with architects on buildings that had acoustic considerations. I worked at Bose when I was in college one summer, and after school I spent about four years at an architectural consulting company. But, I was always in bands and always drawn to the recording studio where I slowly migrated to the producer/engineer’s chair. I built a number of studios including the one we now call Pollen headquarters, Decibelle in San Francisco. It was in the technical side of making records that I found a place that combined my love of engineering and of music. At Decibelle, I’ve gotten to work with some amazing artists like Jonathan Richman, Matt Nathanson, Girls, Kasabian, Kopecky, and The California Honeydrops. Later, in grad school, I studied ambisonics, but this was well before VR had made its way into the mainstream as it has now. So while I was really interested in it, it sort of stayed on the back shelf of my brain as I returned to more traditional composition and record making. Then VR came along and all of sudden there was a way to apply the spherical concepts of sound to something with real world applications. I had to kind of go back and relearn a lot of it because I had left it for dead, but it was there and I was able to dust it off.
Pearl in particular was a VR project that fell right into the sweet spot of traditional record making and highly technical VR sound. It was a project that really pushed me, and all of us at Pollen, to use a wide range of disciplines. To write and produce music that sounded like it came from a classic record but realize it within a truly ambitious VR film was totally a dream job. I got to basically use everything I had learned as an engineer, musician, and producer.
Scot, can you tell us more about Where Elephants Weep and Studio CLA? How has Cambodia influenced your musical career?
Scot: In 2002 I started a non-profit recording studio in Phnom Penh that grew into a media production house, partnering with Cambodian Living Arts. It was an amazing eight year adventure that allowed me to work with some amazing people, from young aspiring audio engineers and filmmakers, to traditional master musicians, to Broadway luminaries and cultural revolutionaries. Peter Gabriel and his amazing right-hand man Dickie Chappell supported us with much needed studio gear, which gave us all the headwind that kept us going for several years. One of the biggest projects we worked on was a hybrid rock/traditional shadow puppet rock opera called “Where Elephants Weep,” which I music directed. Its premiere was nationally televised, and was then officially banned… that’s another article in itself. I co-invented a couple instruments for that project that have both woven themselves into other music I’ve created since, but I think the biggest impact it had on my life was realizing how much music can mean to a culture that was nearly deprived of it following the devastation of the 70’s and 80’s, and how big a role music has played in its renewal.
What is next for Pollen?
JJ: Pollen continues to work on VR projects as composers and sound designers, as well as providing full location sound and app implementation. Scot mentioned it before but Son of Jaguar and Sonaria are two VR projects currently being released by Google Spotlight Stories. We have two on deck with Baobob: Rainbow Crow and Asteroids. We are now composing the main titles for a Discovery Channel show. We are working with Tool of NA on an AR project for Macallan and have a project in production with Ntropic called Phone of the Wind.
We are doing quite a bit of consulting on software and hardware with spatial audio components which has been a really fun diversion from writer’s block.
We maintain and compose for the Pollen library, a collection of music made by us and our favorite composers and bands. It’s by invitation only and is available for licensing. It’s a very unique collection of music and grows every week. Right now it’s at about 3,000 tracks.
We also have an app we’ve developed called Showlio (www.showlio.com). It’s not really related to VR sound, but is a tool we built internally and it was just too useful to keep to ourselves. Everyone we told about it wanted to use it. It’s basically a way to turn the stuff you keep in the cloud (Dropbox for example) into a website. It can be done in seconds and updating happens automatically. It’s not officially out yet, and the development moves at a snail’s pace since it’s sort of a side project, but we hope to have a stable version available soon!
Follow Pollen on twitter, facebook and check out their website here. For more Google Spotlight Stories, check out the GSS YouTube channel.
Check out more interviews from writer/editor Dan Light: