Student Makes Music for Finnish Ad Campaign
Tuomas Norjanen used his break back home in Finland to land a high-profile summer gig.
Image courtesy of Tuomas Norjanen
Every summer Berklee students pursue some of the coolest jobs in the music and performing arts industries. In our series Summer Stints we take a quick look at them.
Name: Tuomas Norjanen
Age: 23
Hometown: Helsinki, Finland
Job: Jingle arranger for nationwide advertising campaign
When Tuomas Norjanen went back home for the summer, after his first year at Berklee, he started calling everyone he knew to tell them about what he's learned and that he was available for hire. Social circles in Helsinki are small and tight, he says, and soon enough word had gotten to a guitar student's father, a man who knew the CEO of the biggest advertising company in Finland.
Within days, Norjanen had an interview with the CEO and used the opportunity to tell him that he was versatile, had arranged for big ensembles before (including for his Writing for Big Band course with Manuel Kaufmann), and was given Berklee's Quincy Jones Scholarship. The CEO was sold: Norjanen was hired to handle the music for a nationwide advertising campaign for Elisa, the country's largest telecommunications provider.
The company needed a 45-second arrangement and told him to start the piece with acoustic guitar and then expand it to be as large as a Hans Zimmer score.
"I was in charge of arranging and producing the song, making the budget, hiring the musicians and the studio, writing the parts, and conducting the session," Norjanen, a fifth-semester contemporary writing and production major, says. "I mean, it even had a choir and a string orchestra in it!"
The ad will be released on September 1 on TV, radio, Spotify, and YouTube.
