If you’ve taken the time to read her bio, there is precious little that Amber can not do, or has not done. She’s got tons of cred in every lake we swim in. She’s a composer, sound designer, singer, mixer, engineer, and producer. She’s like Rick Meyer but with much much better hair. Thanks to Amber the word ‘stoked’ is being used a lot more these days around here. Indeed we are very stoked to have her in our world.

If you’ve tried to follow our blog at Rumble you may have wondered if perhaps we were dead, belly up, fallen down a well, or even worse, run off and joined country music bands. Well no such luck, we’re still here. But admittedly we have been ignoring the blog. We realize that this sets a poor example for future generations (cue Harry Chapin) …but there were planes to catch and bills to pay….

Just to prove a point, In the last 6 months or so we’ve made plenty of our own history: Consider…

- We opened Rumble Los Angeles - in Venice CA to be exact. About 3 blocks from the beach, which of course makes everything sound better. The space is wonderful and we’re glad to be working in multiple time zones. Stop in for a visit next time you are on a company paid junket to LA.

- We’ve hired Tommy Walter, and Chris Beaty as staff composers. These guys are wildly talented and fantastically easy to work with. We are lucky to have them.

- We added Voice Over patch capabilities utilizing Source Connect in both our Minneapolis and Venice studios.

- We’ve worked with lots of our favorite folks and some new ones too on a ton of projects including, Sprint, Cannondale, Subuaru, Sesame street, Tillamook, and that’s just a small sampling.

- Rumble go to guy Jerome Rankine went and became a DAD! We hear the baby’s already looking at colleges.

- Rumble super stud Matt kirkwold got engaged – Sorry ladies!

- Thanks to our partners at GoKart Labs we totally re-vamped our website, featuring artwork from Kii Arens and Amy Meyer.

- We’ve got a REP – we might even tell you who she is, but hopefully she’ll tell you first.

- We’ve suffered through the worst winter and spring in history and didn’t kill even one person for food or otherwise.

- We’ve got NEW T-shirts – And if you’ve read this far, a simple mention of the T-shirts will get you one! just email me

hey, stop in for a beer one of these days. They finally named one after us!

We are very proud of our team, our clients, and the work we’ve done together. The collaboration between Rumble and the people we have the opportunity to work with is great, and we are flattered by the recognition of our peers.

Rumble was honored in a variety of categories including earning a gold and bronze in the original Music TV category for our work with Target. We also took home several awards in the category of Sound Design – Effects, Remix, Etc. for our work with Target, Sesame Street and DC Shoes. Rumble also earned awards in the categories of Sound Design in Radio, TV and Other, and Original Music for the Web for its work with Target. The Show Winners

The Show is sponsored by the Advertising Federation of Minnesota, a non-profit, professional trade association serving the local advertising community including agencies, advertisers, suppliers and students.

Rumble Sound designers Matt Kirkwold and Jerome Rankine put in the herculean effort with marathon sessions, huge numbers of source files, and an incredibly short time frame to make this piece sound positively scary.

Watch it here – Turn it up and hang on!
Gymkhana THREE, Part 2; Ultimate Playground; l’Autodrome, France

Target recently teamed up with Chris Riehl and the talented folks at Motion Theory to build a high energy animated world to tout their newly remodeled stores. It’s a behind the scenes look at what it would take to remodel a store if you could only use cartoon characters with cartoon devices and cartoon methods and cartoon safety standards. So naturally they asked us at Rumble if we could create a cartoon score and make some cartoon sounds that would ignore cartoon audio standards make it even more cartoon fun. We said, hell yes in fact we’re a cartoon music house.

Rumble Composer Tommy Barbarella penned and produced the score and sound design man Jerome Rankine imagined all the cartoon style fun sounds, and of course our own cartoon character Rick Meyer as the voice of the foreman.

Showcased on Creativity Online – AdCritic Spot of the day July 27, 10

Composer / Sound designer Rick Meyer drew upon his own enthusiasm for racing to attack the project. “This was a sweet piece to work on. We were given several hours of raw car audio, and had to put something together that not only pumped up an already exciting visual, but had to be realistic, as any real racers would know what was going on.” Rick worked with Editor Phil Hamer at DC, with input from DC Founder (and driver) Ken Block and Creative Director Nate Morley making this one of the most downloaded web-films of its kind.

Rumble would like to congratulate DC on receiving a Bronze award at this year’s One Show .

We’re glad we could be a part of this very fun, (and very loud) adventure.

(click to view webisode series)

The storyline follows Bird and Bee on the quest for a little one. Agency mono created the campaign for its client.

Composer Rick Meyer comments, “ We scored these playing to the realism of their situation, all the while ignoring the fact that we’re dealing with a grown man and woman in a bird and bee costume,” he adds, “The ukelele seemed like just the thing to tell their story.”


Adds Jess Ford, “Having Scott Vincent direct and Charlie Schwartz edit the project made our involvement easy. We knew it would be  great.”

CREDITS
Agency:                mono
Creative Dir:       Chris Lange
Copywriter:         Paula Maki Biondich
Art Director:       Jim Landry
Producer:            Lisa Keljik
Composer:           Rick Meyer
Exec Prod:           Jess Ford
Director:              Scott Vincent
Editor:                 Charlie Schwartz, Schnitt Edit

Bowl Games, Valentines day, Charitable giving. What else is there really? Well plenty actually. Target asked Rumble to create a massive amount of music and audio bits to accompany these Facebook based e-cards for Valentine’s day. As a result of this promotion fans of Target’s Facebook page increased by over 20% , which is a HUGE number. And let’s not forget the huge number of dollars that Target donated to the 4 charities as a result of this promotion. As usual, Rumble is in the middle of another WIN – WIN. Here are just a couple of examples of the work.

“Target ‘Art Unfolds’ Spot Breaks During Golden Globes”

(Minneapolis, MN – January 21, 2010)

Target breaks the latest in a series of art-inspired animated television commercials, “Art Unfolds” during this year’s 2010 Golden Globe Awards.

Click to play spot

The dream-like spot begins with a simple red box that opening to reveal the Target Bull’s-eye gliding along a series of unfolding, falling panels as playful illustrations spring to life. The spot’s percussive-driven underscore carries and builds as the panel montage of illustrative imagery depicting film-making, dance, music, and painting unravels then cleverly refolds into the signature Target Bull’s-eye.

Rumble composer Tommy Walter comments, “The box opens in way that feels whimsical, yet clock-like and ‘measured,’ so I began experimenting with a shuffling rhythm that when ‘straightened out’ would naturally speed up with the quickening pace of the visual reveal. I found the organic ‘quirky sound’ by intuitively experimenting with hitting pots and pans, and discovered that a sock covered spoon struck the perfect percussive ‘pitch’ that I was looking for.” Jerome Rankine supported Walter’s score with a subtle, yet complex blend of folds, clicks, whirrs and billows.

This project, like the other ‘Art’ inspired projects was uniquely challenging because when the visuals are SO compelling, because the music has a really big responsibility to be just as engaging. The challenge is to make sure the score doesn’t overpower the picture, while making it smart enough to convey the message,” said Rick Meyer. Tommy Walter adds, “And the pots and pans that I used were really purchased at Target.”

Credits:

Agency: Good People, Minneapolis

Creative Director: Shannon Petinni
Producer: Barth Ward
Principal: Betsy Treinen
Production Company: Eyeball, New York
Music Company: Rumble, Minneapolis
Composer: Tommy Walter
Sound Design: Jerome Rankine
Mixer: Rick Meyer
Executive Producer: Jess Ford

Minnesota State Lottery Scratch Games “Pizza” from anavarrete on Vimeo.

“These spots — beyond being terribly adorable because of the furry creatures — were all about the dialogue. Colle McVoy creatives had approximately 13 hours of dialogue to play with… They gave us such great bits of stuff that we had trouble picking the perfect line to convey, say, a rodent’s love of deep dish pizza.”

“It’s always an adventure with Colle McVoy. We’re just happy it was Hamsters and not Circus Clowns. We’re scared of Circus Clowns.”