: Classical thumris to rap: Pranaay Rijia on the nuances of composing music for Ads #IndiaNEWS #Featured Meet Pranaay Rijia who has composed music for over 500 ads. In conversation with Social Samosa,

Classical thumris to rap: Pranaay Rijia on the nuances of composing music for Ads #IndiaNEWS #Featured
Meet Pranaay Rijia who has composed music for over 500 ads. In conversation with Social Samosa, he shares his experience of composing foot-tapping music for advertising commercials and what make the beats an integral part of the campaign.

Meet Pranaay Rijia a music composer whose latest work in advertising includes Gillette s campaign Get Your Mach On ft Shreyas Iyer, Shubman Gill, and Sanju Samson. Rijia has composed music for more than 500 ads films to date which includes brands like Kia Sonnet, Mirinda, and more. A unanimous opinion states that sounds and music contribute to enhancing a visual concept and that Indian advertising is no different.

We get in conversation with Rijia to deep dive into the Music Making process for advertising campaigns, the challenges involved, and some behind-the-scenes coop.

Work Talk (Gillette Campaign) – Pranay Rijia Advertising Journey

Rijia describes his experience of working on the ‘Gillette Get Your Mach On’ as spectacular and recalls working with Sandipan Bhattacharya (MD & CCO at Grey Group) aka Sandy, Juneston Mathana (ECD at Grey Group), and Shoubhik Roy (Producer of Magic Lantern) the director Matthias Zentner.

Working with these guys has been a breeze because weve always been in sync, weve done previous campaigns together, so they exactly know what to expect when they call Pranaay for the music, he exclaims. The agency creatives had written a beautiful rap. So we had to modify it a little bit so that it flows better. We got a rapper from the US called, Lucci Damus, who I think has just killed it with his rap and with his delivery.

It all started with a trap hook. The team tried trap-based instrumentation as they wanted to make it very modern since the campaign targeted young adults and featured youth icons Shreyas Iyer, Shubham Gill, Sanju Samson.

Once the creatives jammed over the trap beat, they got Lucci Damus to perform his rap on it. The whole process took place on several zoom sessions and feedbacks. We delivered that track in about one and a half months with the changes and edit. The entire process was extremely seamless, adds Rijia.

Composing Music For Ad Films V/s Long Form Content

Composing for ad films is a completely different ball game than composing for long formats such as a 50-minute episode of a show or a movie. The most obvious is the shorter time span. Rijia states, The ad films are 30 seconders or one minute at most. Sometimes well have a director’s cut, which is 2-3 minutes. So, apart from the time, which is the most important factor, I think it is also important to present a shorter idea like you cant have long hooks in your ad jingles you need to have shorter hooks that can be repeated.