28-May-08 3:00 PM CST

Froggie goes a-courtin'

The Budgett's frog had two fangs and screamed, so, of course, producers of the 30-second television spot touting the Frog Bog at the Newport Aquarium named it Psychofrog.

"He tries to bite you," said Greg Newberry, president of O'Bryonville-based Animal Instinct Advertising, which has launched a multimedia advertising campaign for the Newport Aquarium.

• Hear the frogs

The spot, an unusual advertisement of morphing frog images, will air on broadcast television through the summer travel season locally and in Louisville, Lexington and Dayton.

It celebrates the aquarium's Year of the Frog and promotes the new frog exhibit.

"That Budgett frog is a crazy little frog," Newberry said. "He can eat a mouse. Sometimes nothing was working, so we'd say, 'Let's get Psychofrog out here and see what he can do.' "

The distinctive advertisement is a colorful collage of dozens of exotic frogs, one morphing into another, all backed by a catchy soundtrack created from frog croaks.

The first challenge for this ad, called a Frog Metamorphosis Music Video, was to create the soundtrack from thousands of frog creaks, croaks and chirps.

Matt Hueneman at Sound Images, a downtown music production company, engineered the soundtrack, and as frog song maestro, Hueneman had to listen to a cacophony of frog sounds compiled by naturalist Lang Elliot, owner of an Ithaca, N.Y.-based studio.

Hueneman started with a drum track similar to what might be in a Bo Diddley song.

Every time a drumstick hit a percussion instrument, Hueneman found a digital substitution in croak or creak.

"Some frogs sounded like a shaker or a Cuban cabassa. A couple of frogs had a low-end bass note. That was a great substitute for a bass drum," Hueneman said. "We let the frogs do most of the playing."

Bob Nyswonger, a former bass player for the Psychodots, the Raisins and the Bears, and Randy Villars, saxophonist in the BlueBirds Big Band, rounded out the tune.

Mark Cretcher, editor at CommandX Digital Media, an O'Bryonville ad production agency, aligned the song with the images - an exercise in creative but complicated tedium.

Each frog used in the ad had to be put in the same place on a Plexiglas panel so it could easily blend into the next. Then, to prevent the spread of disease, the panel had to be washed before another frog could be placed on it.

Some frogs were asked to jump, but didn't oblige. Some were ordered to move, but instead just sat there.

"Sometimes you just had to wait them out," said Newberry.

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