NEW YORK — For Beyoncé, girls run the world. At Nickelodeon, girls rule the world, and that’s no coincidence. In need of an animated, beat-driven, girl-powered promo, Nick turned to longtime creative partner Nutmeg with a creative brief that was as brief as it gets: create a promo built around an original Beyoncé-esque song with “lyrics” crafted from sound bites by female characters across eight popular animated series.

The challenge was business as usual for Nutmeg, where the craft of creating music-based promos is something of a specialty. Nutmeg and Nick have collaborated on a half-dozen, several of which have struck viral gold on YouTube. To date, the “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Trans-Dimensional Remix” has racked up 2.1 million views, the “Alvin and the Chipmunks Megamix” stands at 14.7 million views and a remix of the Silentó smash “Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae)” featuring the artist dancing with a dozen Nickelodeon animated characters while singing original lyrics by Nutmeg Executive Producer and Writer Mike Greaney is fast approaching an astounding 40.1 million views, making it the channel’s most popular video of all time.

Greaney was, in fact, the executive producer on all three of those promos as well as several others, although they’re not really promos—previews of upcoming shows or episodes—in the traditional sense.

“Image-building spots would be more accurate,” he says. “They’re meant to promote the essence of a brand by zeroing in on the elements that make them so popular.”

For the latest image-building spot, titled “Girls Rule the World,” those elements would be the distinctive female characters that inhabit Nickelodeon’s animated universe, with all of their nerve and verve on full display. As with every project, Greaney assembled and supervised a small post-production team: Sound Designer, Mixer and Composer JD McMillin, Editor Liz Burton, Graphics and VFX Director Stephen C. Walsh. The process began with the music, since the music would inspire the editing.

“Nick gives us a lot of creative freedom,” says JD McMillin. “The request was for a ‘Beyoncé-esque song,’ but my goal wasn’t to create a Beyoncé sound-alike, rather, I aimed for a song that evokes the theme of empowerment that Beyoncé frequently explores.”

To that end, McMillin selected a rhythmic, beat-heavy stock track with stems that allowed him to reconstruct the song to suit his needs. Next, he searched through more than 150 clips from eight animated series that had been loaded into an AVID sequence and imported into Pro Tools with video, looking for action-based sound effects to serve as the visual beat.

“Being able to work with the clips allows me to be sure the visuals associated with the sounds are appropriate, cool and fun,” he says.

Once the beat was in place, McMillin started constructing the hook—“the most important part of any song”—from bits of dialogue.

“They needed to have a certain rhythm to them so the character seemed to be singing, not just speaking,” he says. “Sometimes, the best bits require some manipulation to fit into a specific song.”

With the basic song structure complete, McMillin began constructing a narrative—the “fun stuff,” as he calls it.

“I try to fashion a story within each song because otherwise you’re just throwing clips at a timeline. It’s challenging, like a puzzle, but I love it. The real fun is making all the characters ‘sing’ along to the music and, in the end, we have a full audio edit in which all the characters sound like they’re singing with each other.”

With the audio completed, McMillin handed the track off to Editor Liz Burton. A corresponding Quicktime with a visual timecode allowed Burton to quickly match and sync the high-resolution footage.

“And then it was time to play,” she says.

Burton had pored over footage from all eight series and created reels of beauty shots and fun action moments based on a list of keywords provided by McMillin. Drawing from those reels, she was able to replace repetitive moments and add multiple visuals for certain lines.

“My goal was to maintain the idea of the characters’ actions creating the beats while also incorporating girl-power visuals from all the shows,” she says.

A request from Nick to add a “GIRLS” title card inspired Burton to add and animate others, including a 1-2-3 intro as the music track kicks in and the word “FUN” when the lyrics shift halfway through the song from “Girls, we got this!” to “We’re gonna have fun!”

“The titles spice things up a bit and get kids involved in the lyrics,” says Burton. “The song is fast-paced, so it’s nice to draw attention to the words without cluttering up the video too much.”

The use of keyable bounding boxes and split-screen effects, which Burton had incorporated in similar promos to great success, allowed for more characters to be featured and also maintained the momentum.

“We joked that my timeline had so many layers it looked the New York City skyline,” she says.

Adding some white flashes, an extra “Shhhh!” soundbite and a classic mic drop by Princess from “Harvey Beaks” rounded out the editing process. The finishing touches were provided by Graphics and VFX Director Stephen C. Walsh, who created a crumbling wall effect behind Princess to sound design by McMillin.

“We considered having the wall shatter, but we concluded that something shattering is usually a bad thing,” he says, of the collective thinking that went into the effect. “Crumbling, on the other hand, conjures something epic and awesome. That’s the psychology of it, anyway.”

The final “Girls Rule the World” promo—or image-building spot—is a 1:13 stomping super-girl-group power-pop anthem featuring Sandy, April, Claire, Miriam, Brittany, Jeanette, Eleanor, Ladybug, Leni, Lola, Luna, Lana, Wanda and, of course, Princess.

“This project was a joy to edit, especially as a woman,” says Burton. “Girls rule! I can’t get the song out of my head… but that’s a good thing!”

Larry Closs is director of marketing for New York-based Nutmeg Creative.

CREDITS:

“Girls Rule the World”

Network: Nickelodeon

Agency: Nutmeg

Producer: Mike Greaney

Editor: Liz Burton

Sound Editor and Sound Designer: JD McMillin

Graphics Designer: Stephen C. Walsh

Featuring characters from:

SpongeBob SquarePants

Alvin and the Chipmunks

Fairly Odd Parents

Sanjay and Craig

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

The Loud House

Harvey Beaks

Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug & Cat Noir.

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