| splash into life | |
See the ad. Read about the No Time Like Now ad too. |
concept This was the second ad that we produced. We started by making a list of some typically GenX activities and products. Among the items on our list were skating, rock music, lava lamps, and cars. Next we came up with the slogan: "Splash into life!" We felt it would work well with a younger audience because, "Splash into life!" also says, "be young, be wild, have all the fun you can." So we worked with those elements and came up with the concept for the ad: a teenager drinks a can of Splash! and then goes out and does all these fun, high-energy things. It worked out especially well since we had no budget and could shoot all the scenes in the house and in the driveway. :-) The "Kids at Play" sign pulls the whole ad together at the end. The simple pictures of stick figures playing ball and the word "kids" contrast nicely with the visuals used in the rest of the commercial. The shot of the sign actually happened by accident. The original storyboards called for the slogan to appear over a shot of the car driving away but when we went out to get the skating footage, we noticed the sign across the street.
production The first two shots were longer than the others and didn't involve any camera movement. Everything else was supposed to have a really fast-paced "in your face" feel to it. In order to achieve this, we used a lot of camera movement, different types of angles (Dawn had to lie on the street to get the shot of Darren skating by), and a lot of close-ups. The most complicated scene to set up was the guitar-playing scene. Dawn had to lug the guitar, amp and digital piano downstairs and arrange everything so that it would look like the room of a music freak. We were considering throwing a huge stack of music into the shot and letting the pages flutter down as Darren played, but decided that it would look too staged. Another interesting thing to note is that in the driving scene Darren is not actually driving. He has his permit, but technically he can't drive without a licensed driver in the car (Darren comments, "I've now passed my test and can 'Splash' into life, for real" ;). Luckily the wind was blowing, so the breze coupled with the camera movement made it seem like Darren was actually driving.
post-production The first two shots were done in black and white in order to heighten the contrast between Darren-before-Splash and Darren-after-Splash. They are also a good second longer than all of the other shots. This ad has about twice the number of shots as the "No Time Like Now" ad. As a result, we had to keep them all really short in order to make everything fit in the 15 seconds. Timing is a very important issue for advertisers. We stretched our ad to 18 seconds, but "real" advertisers are required to stay within the time limit. It goes by really fast, but the text that says "Splash" is actually made from footage of soda being poured into a glass of ice. That was created in Adobe After Effects using something called "track matting." We don't really understand all of it yet, but the effect looked cool on the ad. NOTE: The actor in this ad is Dawn's brother Darren Sueoka. Check out Rock Revolution, his entry into the Think Quest '98 competition.
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