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© Images by Jason Almendinger
BEST DAMN SWEET TEA
This was one of my favorite commercials because I had a very limited timeframe to tell any kind of a story. The brand asked for something fun, exciting, and dynamic for this commercial. Since the drink is more of a "cook-out" beverage I immediately decided it had to have the feel of a traditional Sunday football tailgate/BBQ. These environments are always fun, busy, and dynamic. Now, how do we create a concept that highlights the product in this type of environment in a matter of seconds?
I had the idea of using the linear 'oner' concept from cinema, but used in tandem with speed ramping. This meant that everything was going to need to happen in a single take- no cuts, no editing. Also, the speed ramping (a lot of frames per second, 900 to be exact) would allow us to selectively speed up or slow down the scene as we pleased. This control gave us creative freedom as well as logistical control.
For inspiration, I looked at a lot of BBQ scenes from movies like Me, Myself and Irene (2000), Varsity Blues (1999), and Vacation (1983). From this the production team quickly dialed in our production design; however, the real challenge was choreographing the scene with the camera move. The goal was to capture a series of still images or 'scenes' that sweep across and eventually land onto a main product shot.
The first step was choosing the color palette. I wanted to stick with the brand colors, which determined the earthly brown and orange. Being that it's an outdoor BBQ, green only seemed natural and yellow was a nice accent. This palette made the product feel very fitting to the environment. The only other conscious color choice was splashing blue tones throughout to add contrast.
CONCEPT
Since I didn't have much time to tell the story every second had to be carefully thought out. To make it more efficient for post production I decided that having the camera move laterally across (what feels like) one large picture frame, would be the optimal choice. This gave us creative flexibility while remaining visually impactful. I worked with a storyboard artist to help convey the concept to our client:
As you can see, the concept is simply one large picture frame that the camera moves across- beginning with a product and ending with a product. Below you is the final execution:
TECHNICAL
Though the lighting setup was fairly straight forward, it was big. As it is with most outside day shoots it is paramount to use the sun to your benefit. I planned to wait on the sun to begin to settle west before we would execute our takes. My team and I spent the entire morning with about a 9 hour set up as we waited for the light to be where we wanted. Knowing where the sunlight would land, I was able to set my wall of 20x20 bounce rags to fill in our entire scene. Just in case we didn't get enough bounce from the Mother Nature, I planned a contingency wall of M40 HMI lights to fill our shadow side. To put it into perspective, we were using what would be the equivalent output to about 5,000 house lights. With the amount of money at stake it is always important to have economical contingencies (like having enough light) because we definitely needed it on this shoot. Below is the basic floor plan to show all of our departments a common direction the entire crew was working towards.
© Images by Jason Almendinger
Next I had to do a "product only" spot, which was technically easier, but sometimes product shots aren't nearly as simple as they seem. The same concept artist pre-visualized some frames here:
And below is the final execution of this setup:
Behind the scenes: The lights and the sunny day made the ice (and the people) melt!
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