behind the scenes

I got a hilarious email from our wardrobe stylist Jeanne yesterday… Apparently earlier this week in Wales, 2500 students at Swansea University broke the world record for the most people dressed as Smurfs.  Check ‘em out!

Blue face paint and all… that’s commitment!   

This reminded me of one of my favorite FLF projects I’ve produced… A commercial for Smurfs toys!   I was so excited when we got the project — I’ve loved the Smurfs ever since I was little, and the client asked us to take that retro-cool brand and go ultra-contemporary with the commercial.  We even got the amazing, Grammy-nominated Shiny Toy Guns to re-record the famous Smurfs “La La” song!

Our cast was fabulous. The break dancer boy was one of the most amazing break dancers I’ve ever seen… and he’s only 10 years old!  Definitely a star in the making.  Kandee the Make-Up Artist did super, super fun hair and make-up (check out her blog entry about doing hair/ make-up on the Smurfs set), and Jeanne fixed up the most trendy, funky wardrobe. 

Check out the final spot below!

Jerry wrote about this project for the Tahoe Forest Hospital Cancer Program a while ago… Just thought I’d share the final video.

I should issue a warning though… get your tissues ready! It’s a tough one. Working on the edit, we were in tears the whole time.

Don’t know what made me want to post this today… Maybe all the rain in Reno this week has been putting me in a somber mood.

On a happier note, have a great weekend everyone!

We just received first drafts of the scripts for our next toy commercial shoot. It’ll be three national girls’ spots, and the scripts look great so far… we’re excited to make them come to life!

I think the world of kids’ advertising is so interesting… It’s much more restrictive than the average TV-watcher might realize. Whenever we get into script writing, we have to watch for the following red flags:

1) Hard sell language like “Collect them all!”
2) Superlative language, like best, cutest, fastest, most stylish, coolest, etc.
3) Any implication that the product will make a kid cooler or more popular.
4) Shooting toys, water toys, etc: These toy spots usually need to show parental supervision in the background at some point, and should say “adult supervision required.”
5) Rigging and special effects: Everything we show must be “kid recreatable.” We can’t rig it or use special effects to make it look like a toy will do something it actually can’t.

There are also stringent rules about the disclaimers at the end: what the product includes, doesn’t include, etc. It’s all for a great reason, of course… making sure kids don’t get duped!

Here are a couple examples… Notice how there are always hands making the dolls move in this Hannah Montana spot?   Since the dolls don’t move on their own, we had to represent them accurately and show hands activating their movement.

Notice how the voiceover specifies 272 “scale” miles per hour in this spot?

The tricky part is with action toys. When they’re little pieces of plastic that drive and fly, they’re hard to control, and even harder to capture doing amazing stunts!   Jerry’s got a crazy knack for it though.

I can’t wait til late July when we can finally release our most recent action toy commercial. We’re pretty excited about the product, and the commercial is gonna blow you away!

Headquarters is buzzing this morning… Jerry’s upstairs editing with one of our favorite ad agencies, and meanwhile I’m prepping for an interview shoot tomorrow, and an action sports shoot at Lake Tahoe this weekend (with underwater cinematography!  Fun…). 

In the meantime, I wanted to post this little reel we put together last night.  One of the agencies we work with requested this for a potential project.  It’s samples of some of our non-fiction stuff, including a promo Jerry did for Richard Branson’s reality show, a clip from a property management video, a bit from our large scale installation at the Nevada museum of art, and portions of two of our extreme sport documentaries… Redbull Elevation and a show about Travis Pastrano.  

Although Jerry got his start in extreme sport films, most people nowadays think of us as a commercial production company.   It’s fun to give people a look into the other stuff we do!

Since we’ve been talking cowboys, guns, and all things Western in the last few posts, I thought I’d post a project we did a little earlier this year: a commissioned artwork for an exhibit at the Nevada Museum of Art.

Cowboy poetry art piece for the Nevada Museum of Art

It was an amazing project in which we filmed three current day cowboy poets reciting the poem “Grass” by Buck Ramsey.  The filming took us from the grasslands of Texas to the high deserts of Nevada.  

Called “Between Grass and Sky: Rhythms of a Cowboy Poem,” the exhibit opened on January 16th.   Hundreds of people from the community came to the premiere night… We were honored to be a part of it, and amazed to see our piece projected in full blu-ray glory on a giant, beautifully decrepit, old roadside billboard.   Here are some pics (by photographer Aaron Underwood — thank you, Aaron!) of the exhibit and the opening night:

Very cool concept… Artist Nik Hafermaas, who designed the exhibit, wanted to present cowboy life in a non-traditional way: not folksy, rather modern and avant-garde.   You can see that idea reflected in our film:  instead of cutting at the end of lines or stanzas, Nik urged us to cut in unexpected places.  He also told us he wanted extreme close ups of the poets — so we “stitch them together in our imagination.”  It was inspired art direction, and a wonderful experience working with him.

If you’re in the Reno area, check out the exhibit, “Between Grass & Sky,” at the Nevada Museum of Art!  It’s on display for another month (until May 17th).