Production Diary – How Far Would You Go?

Last Thursday marked the start and completion of photography on my latest and beer smugglingest spec spot to date, HOW FAR WOULD YOU GO? Telling the story of a man, a mountain and the most incredible beer run in recorded history, the 30 second spot was filmed over a period of 13 hours on an ice cave set that, in hindsight, bears kind of a stunning resemblance to the Fortress of Solitude.

As with LIVE THE GAME, this spot had what we’ve come to refer to as “accelerated pre-production,” which is a fancy term for what happens when the right people say you can use a set on one day and one day only…or not use it at all. Needless to say, we jumped at the opportunity to use a fully lit set as unique and epic as an arctic ice cave – phone calls were made, scripts were written and storyboards were drawn as soon as we got the go-ahead.

While über-producer Christina Ferguson got to work, using her day job as a front to start securing equipment and crew, SILVER BULLET, COP AND CUP! and OFFICE LIFE veteran Jeffrey Waldron and I got to work at designing the look of the spot. It was during one of our tech scouts that we met Mike Lynch, who was initially sent over to kick us off the property and ended up joining the crew as our RED camera supplier and technician. For anyone who isn’t familiar with the camera system, it’s the crown jewel of HD technology available today (and built by Oakley, which is almost too awesome for me to handle.) There’s a waiting list a year long to purchase one and – thanks to Mike – we had one to capture the spot in at an unreal 4K resolution.

Meanwhile, executive producer John Corser used a combination of black magic and incredible behind-the-scenes skill to deliver all the insurance we would need for the shoot, vitally important crew members and an entire suburban street set – a critical component to the beginning and end of the commercial. Working with him was a great experience and I have my fingers crossed I’ll be doing it again soon.

One 6AM call time and a traditional trip to Noah’s Bagels later, it was all of a sudden time to shoot the commercial. Unloading equipment into the 40 tons of salt we used to double for snow, we powered up the camera, fired up the lights and ramped our production machine up to full speed. Working on the set was an absolute dream – not only did it provide an epic quality to the story, it also provided us the opportunity to further build on the scale of our commercial in post. Taking full advantage of the four storey greenscreen erected just outside the cave’s mouth, we shot our actor – Kenneth Rudnicki – entering from a high-altitude mountain peak that will be added in the coming months by VFX guru Phil Broste.

The flip side of the VFX coin was that we faced the challenge of working around a time consuming visual effects scan being done on the exact spot we’d selected for one of our most important shots. Luckily, thanks to Jeff’s incredible team, we were able to find inventive ways of getting all the coverage we needed for the spot. Little did we know that on our next set – the suburban street – would be where the true challenge would lie.

Finding ourselves on the doorstep of a production that had paid to rent the set, we were promptly kicked off the property. This…was a problem. We only had our crew, camera and lenses for a single day and the sun was already starting to dip in the sky. With half of what promised to be our best commercial yet and no foreseeable means of being able to finish. We were, it seemed, dead in the water.

Luckily, John Corser came to the rescue with his superhuman powers of spec spot executive producing. A few phone calls later, we were back on the street and madly capturing every shot we needed to tell the story. We wrapped with Kenneth and his co-star Brandon Bonds right as the sun set, with around 60 gigabytes of data to reflect our hard day’s work. Matthew Gilna has the footage and is sharpening his editing shears as we speak, Phil has reviewed our greenscreen footage and is concocting LORD OF THE RINGS-esque vistas to drop into the background, and Jeffrey is hard at work in a high-tech, super secret government lab, pushing the boundaries of the visible spectrum as he color times the footage. I can already tell that collaborating with them in post is going to be as much fun as working with the incredible crew we had during production. To everyone in the photo below – as well as Bob Ducsay, John Corser, David Womark, JoAnn Perritano and everyone who helped us get this commercial on film – thank you. The finished product is going to be something we’re all proud of, and it never could have happened without you.

Stay tuned for HOW FAR WOULD YOU GO?…coming to an internets near you this July!