Ring around the rosie

Got a pocket full of posies

Husha, husha,

We all fall down

These aren’t just the words to a popular children’s nursery rhyme that originated in the horrific bubonic plague that devastated Europe in the 1300s.

It’s also the musical score for a powerful psa produced by Magic through FCB Toronto to heighten awareness of a present-day epidemic – the spread of aids. The spot is for The Canadian Foundation for aids Research and aired at the recent International Conference for aids held in Vancouver. The psa is also scheduled for national broadcast.

Instead of the whimsical, fast-paced chant of the traditional melody, the spot features the slow, haunting, voice of 20-year-old contemporary pop singer Damhnait Doyle. The unaccompanied voice is pining and introspective, flecked with deep emotion, as it carries the psa forward.

Chris Tait, Elizabeth Taylor and Doug Pennock of Toronto music house Tantrum put together the musical score. Tait worked on Doyle’s debut album, Shadows Wake Me, released last February, and the partners felt she had the voice they were looking for.

‘Her voice is very sweet, very young and innocent,’ says Pennock of the Newfoundland-born singer. ‘Yet there is an awful lot of power there.’

Inspired by the Cowboy Junkies’ Trinity Sessions album, recorded in downtown Toronto’s Trinity Church, they sought out Peter Moore, who engineered the album. Moore lent his help and they recorded Doyle’s performance live-to-dat inside the old church, using a calrec mike, which not only takes the signal from the singer’s voice, but also catches surrounding noises.

‘We wanted to catch all the ambient sounds in the church – the slapback, the reverb that’s naturally there in this huge empty room, even the sounds of the birds outside and all sorts of faint noises,’ explains Pennock. ‘In a studio, you get an absolutely clean, pristine, precise sound. This was an entirely different sensation. All that uncontrollable ambient noise gives it a very natural feeling, like someone singing to themselves. It’s a very personal approach. In a studio you lose that and it would have sounded contrived.’

The Tantrum partners realized that music was crucial to carry through the message of the psa. ‘It takes aids away from being a hot political issue or a social problem and makes it something you are left with by yourself,’ says Pennock. ‘The one voice adds a certain solitude – it is you, by yourself, dealing with it.’

The visuals in the spot are as strikingly simple and natural in tone as the score. One lone image – a softly illuminated, earth-tone globe set against the vast blackness of the universe – appears. Mother Earth turns in time with the music and shots of different perspectives of the world ebb and flow in and out of frame.

Text also moves across the screen (supers and graphics by Spin), revealing the bleak facts: today over 10 million people have aids, and every year that number doubles.

Magic’s Terry Collier shot and directed, with Carmen Dolgay producing.

Continuing the natural feel and simplistic thread of the spot, Collier would have nothing to do with computer-generated pictures of the world; he wanted to shoot a revolving globe live on camera.

‘It gives the spot a more cinematic, filmic feel as opposed to a video effect,’ he says ‘I wanted to get a richness and a warmth out of the globe. I didn’t want it to be a cheesy Star Wars thing.’

He hunted for weeks in search of the perfect globe, even though it meant postponing the shoot, until finding an antique treasure in a store window and begging the owner to borrow it. The globe was carefully taken apart and a pole inserted in the center and rigged to a turntable and motor.

Collier also wanted to illuminate the globe from within. ‘I put a light inside to give it warmth, so it wasn’t just a round object,’ he explains. ‘I wanted to create a sort of life element to the globe.’

Working with editor Olaf Relitzki, Collier once again looked to essential simplicity to make the visuals more striking. The first edit had to be scrapped. ‘It was too busy, there were too many shots,’ Collier explains. ‘It was too distracting. It comes back to the adage that simplicity is sometimes the strongest route to go.’

The psa is the creative brainchild of fcb art director Rob Lawrence, writer Brad Monk and producer Libby Barrett. In fact, they initiated the project.

Monk had the idea of using the nursery rhyme to show the similarity between the ancient and current plague situations, and worked with Lawrence and Barrett to develop the boards. Then they approached canfar, the main agency for distributing aids funds in Canada, which was excited about sponsoring this unique psa.

The creative team at fcb sought out friends in the commercial business to donate their time and support to the project. Everyone involved absorbed their own costs.

Lawrence hopes the spot will touch a chord in people. ‘There is a feeling that aids is under control,’ he says ‘And it’s not. It’s rising, and that’s scary.’

The spot’s close is definitely a profound, thought-provoking moment with its powerful union of text, music and visuals. ‘Without your help, it’s not the disease that will disappear,’ warns the super.

Doyle’s voice, inflected with pain, finishes powerfully with ‘all fall down’ The camera pans off the globe, making it appear to also fall away and disappear into the bleak darkness of the bottom of the screen.

The deeply disturbing and tremendous pull of the psa is in what it doesn’t say – the unspeakable tragedy it invokes.

For Dolgay, this simplicity is the most compelling and unique characteristic of the spot. ‘I sometimes cringe when I watch psas,’ she says. ‘I can’t look, I find them too disturbing. I don’t like sensationalism. I just don’t think it’s the way to get people’s attention. There is so much extremism out there today that if you want to break through and get people’s attention, simplicity is the way to do it.

‘This psa has nothing to do with hiv, drug users, tainted blood, homosexuals. It has everything to do with what the disease is really about – it’s a global situation that isn’t restricted to any categories. It’s an epidemic, it’s worldwide, and touches everyone.’ CB