Whether you liked it or not, the ‘Beach’ installment of the 7Up campaign tended to linger in the old noodle; possessing something that drew you in and made you watch every time it appeared on-screen. For some, that hook was bikini babes; for others, who are inclined to hum to themselves throughout the day, it’s the music.

With elements of a ’70s game show and I Dream of Jeannie thrown in, the surf-cocktail soundtrack, created by Toronto’s Great Big Music, provides a groovy complement to the beach burlesque storyline and stands alone as an infectious tune in its own right. The music stuck in the collective heads of New York Festivals judges, who gave the song a Silver for best original music at the awards.

‘We wanted something that would support the pictures in a quirky way without being overly conscious of the advertising side of it,’ says Great Big’s Carl Lenox. ‘We wanted it to be a piece of music that could stand alone.’

The end result was a piece of ‘cocktail music,’ composed as an entire song and edited down to fit a 30- and 60-second format. The piece of music acts to punctuate the onscreen antics – giving the jarhead more testosterone, the geek more pathos and the babes more bounce – as well as enhance the general sun-soaked mood of a day at the beach.

‘The music parodied the interaction between the people onscreen but it wasn’t too obvious,’ says Lenox. ‘It was all kind of understated. The pictures were fantastic, really easy to write to, and when we put that piece of music up against the pictures it worked really well. At that point it was just a matter of mechanics and to put it together into a nicely coordinated package.’

For the 7Up campaign, the five music creators at the shop, Lenox, Brent Barkman, Tim and Tom Thorney and Pete Coulman, collaborated closely with the agency creatives, sampling different styles of music against rough cuts to determine the best musical accompaniment.

‘It’s kind of a unique shop in that we help each other and work together on projects,’ says Lenox. ‘This project was one large synergistic effort between the agency creative team and our team.’

The spot’s strong images meant that a number of musical concoctions worked, but the final beachy/cocktail groove was the clear winner, fitting the retro feel of the spot while sounding completely original.

‘You didn’t get tired of hearing it; it was entertaining every time you watched it,’ says Lenox. ‘It was light and fun enough but it didn’t try too hard. We just let it be, paid attention to visual cues and it took on a life of its own.’

He says the team also tried to arrange the song so that the natural flow of the tune played out, rather than sounding like an edit of a song.

Lenox says Great Big employs a collaborative approach to all projects, bringing together all the relevant skills available in the 10-person shop. ‘We’ll all get together and look at a spot and decide how it lends itself to each individual’s strength,’ he says.

The shop applies this approach to long-form as well as commercial projects, undertaking tv series and feature work for producers such as Nelvana. The Great Big facility encompasses three studios including an all-digital composing room, a main studio housing a high-end ssl console for recording and mixing, and a recently constructed, completely tapeless room which serves mainly as an audio post facility, says Lenox.

Great Big was recently responsible for the first season of Nelvana’s inaugural 3D animated kids’ series Rolie Polie Olie. Lenox says the project allowed the Great Big team to utilize its entire composing, recording, mixing and audio post facility. The shop worked with live players and recreated old recording styles and sounds to create a ’30s-era Little Rascals-esque soundtrack for the show. The shop also worked on Nelvana’s Babar feature.