When director Kim Gehrig and the creative team at Uncommon received the brief for SiriusXM’s newest campaign, “A Life in Sound,” it felt like the “toughest, ultimate brief,” Gehrig told Ad Age, due in part to the enormity of what needed to be conveyed in the spot. 

The team was tasked with telling the story of a woman’s life through music and dance—the different moods, stages and sounds that one might experience—while anchoring it in the audio entertainment company’s creative platform “Closer,” which tells the story of how it brings listeners closer to what moves them.

When she was brought on to the project, Gehrig only had three weeks to cast and start shooting. The other challenge: To create a medley of music that captured the many stages of a woman’s life. 

The film, which features songs from artists including Doja Cat, spoken words from Conan O’Brien and more, takes the viewer through a woman’s life—from child to adulthood—as she skillfully dances through different vibes of music that change as she travels through time.

“It was all happening at once,” Peter Raeburn, chief creative officer at Soundtree Music, said of putting together the three-minute film (below), which launched on International Women’s Day (March 8). 

Casting expressive dancers

Gehrig cast a wide net looking for dancers of all ages, backgrounds, and creeds “because we didn’t know who we were trying to cast in the image of,” she said.

It was inconsequential whether the dancers chosen were younger or older, she told Ad Age. They simply had to be good, and all the rest would be chosen after. 

Then, Niara Hardister, the third cast member in the film, and Karen McDonald, the last woman to appear, took their turns performing.

“Both blew our minds in the way that they moved to music. They express themselves through music in a way that told the story. It was not just dance,” Gehrig said.

The challenge then shifted to finding more dancers that resembled the Black women chosen and that fit the bill to represent other ages and stages of life. Ultimately, the final cast included three additional women, including one little girl: Tyra Tokiko Haynes-Polke, Paula Leland and Mya Ragland. 

As this went on, Raeburn, Gehrig and Sam Shepherd, chief creative officer at Uncommon, got to work on the soundtrack, in partnership with SiriusXM.

Throughout meetings and studio sessions, all agreed that the medley had to incorporate music that would never otherwise be heard in an ad just as much as it represented stages in life. Heavy metal, Doja Cat and others had to be among the options. 

“Kim and I both have daughters and we were both talking a lot about our girls—what they dance to and what they like, and there’s so much deep research about people’s, particularly girls’ and women’s musical story,” Raeburn told Ad Age. “It’s a privilege for me to sink into that … So [we started with], of course, the Doja Cat song, but there’s also Dionne Warwick and Burt Bacharach [in the medley] … That was a great springboard for us.” 

One remarkable moment Raeburn recalled happened in the studio. As Doja Cat’s “Paint the Town Red” fades out at the lyrics “paint the town—” Gehrig, listening from the studio, screamed “Red!” to mark the introduction of Sepultura’s “Roots Bloody Roots.” 

By the time the first shoot day came, all approvals, transitions and mixing and mastering for music had to be finalized. Raeburn said the hardest challenge was having the world as his musical oyster and finding the songs that felt right in capturing the emotions of innocence and joy, teen rage, growth, maturity of adulthood and the wisdom of old age. 

Once it finally came time to shoot the dancers, who had worked with choreographer Deena Thomsen, Gehrig said her job simply became to direct as little as possible and let the music move the dancers. 

“When we came to this, it was a very honest process between me, the choreographer and the dancers. We started with some improv with each dance and how connect to the music,” she said. 

‘I didn’t have to direct’

“With Maya, [the youngest dancer], she comes at the world with a kind of naivety. Nothing’s gone wrong yet,” Gehrig explained. “She came at this piece of music with an innocence and playfulness. So, Deena worked with her on coming up with a combination of moves that was silly and spoke to a young mind.

“Then the music crossed into the heavy metal and into trenches, the more emotional stuff. [The second dancer], Tyra, had three spaces to occupy. She took on that teenage rage—the lashing out and finding yourself—and [transitioned into] finding herself in her own body and getting lost in the moment of her early 20s,” she continued. 

“Then Niara [took the space] from 27 through to early 50s. She was [to convey]: ‘I'm not looking ahead, I'm not looking back … But then she stays in the party too long. She’s left there when all her friends have moved on. That was the brief we gave to ourselves, because at some point in your life, shit goes down and she has it embody that moment,” Gehrig said of the climax of the spot. 

“Finally it goes back into rebuilding yourself and actually realizing that life is short and you have to live every moment, which then takes us to a quick moment with Paula with her chair and a spin into Karen, who expressed herself through movement about how she felt about life in this moment. Her brief was the transition between embracing the end of life and actually leaving life.”

“I didn’t have to direct,” Gehrig concluded. “I just had to provide an environment where they felt comfortable. My direction in this was to be absent as much as possible to give them the space to be to respond to the music in the most elegant way.” 

The set was built to be intimate and simple—exactly what Shepherd and the Uncommon team were going for. Creatively, that was the point, he said, to let the music resonate most in a world in which most advertising is about being the loudest and most complex.

The “magic trick” of it, as Shepherd described it, was to make viewers feel as though they are watching the passage of time, which he achieved through subtle changes in the dancers’ hair and wardrobe.

“What I loved about this assignment is it was almost radical in its simplicity,” Shepherd said. “I feel like the trend of a lot of things are going towards more complex and adding more on, where we felt like the risky thing was to strip things away. And if you think about the premise of that of not only the casting assignment, but the premise of one woman dancing over the course of her life for three minutes straight and to make that as engaging as it is, is the highest degree of difficulty.”

Suzi Watford, SiriusXM’s chief growth officer, said the company was “blown away” by Gehrig’s approach. “With ‘A Life in Sound,' we wanted to showcase the incredibly human experience of being moved by audio,” Watford said. “It's unlike anything we’ve done before as a brand.”