A few weeks ago I was chal­lenged with the task of cre­at­ing two com­mer­cials. The first com­mer­cial was for a Coke-A-Cola con­test that my uncle informed me of. The con­test called for com­mer­cials of no longer than 50 sec­onds in length, which showed peo­ple enjoy­ing Coke-A-Cola at a con­cert, restau­rant, the movies, or an amuse­ment park.  The sec­ond was a com­mer­cial for the aca­d­e­mic decathlon team, which we some­how got duped into doing  because peo­ple absolutely loved James’ cam­paign com­mer­cial and they wouldn’t take no as an answer.

Now these two com­mer­cials where  polar oppo­sites in terms of impor­tance. The Coke com­mer­cial had $10,000 on the line, it had to have high qual­ity footage, be  impres­sive, and sim­ply be a good com­mer­cial. The decathlon com­mer­cial on the other hand  had vir­tu­ally no impor­tance to us,  we had no expec­ta­tions as far as qual­ity was con­cerned, and our reward was a grade which we weren’t quite sure we would end up receiv­ing. This meant, that we could basi­cally take a pic­ture of somebody’s busted up jaguar that hydroplaned on the free­way write “join decathlon” on the front of the pic­ture, call it a com­mer­cial, and be done with the whole thing.

How­ever, for rea­sons that I am still not fully aware of,  we decided to work on the decathlon com­mer­cial first even though we knew that the Coke com­mer­cial was more impor­tant and would com­mand a greater amount of our time and ded­i­ca­tion. Cre­at­ing the decathlon com­mer­cial was hon­estly one of the hard­est things that I’ve ever had to do. It wasn’t so much the fact that I wasn’t capa­ble of cre­at­ing it, or that it was tech­ni­cally chal­leng­ing, it was more so the fact that I had no moti­va­tion or inspi­ra­tion to go off of. The feel­ing could be com­pared to the feel­ing that one gets when they are try­ing to date an ex girl­friend who broke up with them because she was a cheater and had no respect for that indi­vid­ual in the first place. Which is to say that com­ing up with ideas for the com­mer­cial was a shame­ful, painful, regret­ful, and ulti­mately unevent­ful expe­ri­ence. After an embar­rass­ing  hour of throw­ing around crappy ideas we decided to go with a “Locker Insurance”-esque com­mer­cial, which wouldn’t be too hard to shoot, and would have enough spice to cap­ture some sort of audi­ence. To be hon­est, the main appeal of such an idea was the fact that we could com­plete it and be through with the whole thing as quickly as pos­si­ble. Thus, we came up with a few lines to say, had a basic sce­nario, took three shots, edited it in a half an hour and we were done with our first commercial.

The Coke com­mer­cial, was even more of a chal­lenge. Unlike the decathlon com­mer­cial, we were incred­i­bly inspired and moti­vated to cre­ate the Coke com­mer­cial. There was $10,000 on the line, and it was really a chance for us to pull out all of the stops (which in case you didn’t real­ize is a ref­er­ence to how an organ works) how­ever, the sce­nar­ios demanded by Coke where a lit­tle ridicu­lous. We could 1. Depict a con­cert, which was pos­si­ble given my Dad’s com­pany, but impos­si­ble given the amount of peo­ple that it would have called for. 2. Depict an amuse­ment park, because we know how cam­era friendly amuse­ment parks are. 3. Depict the movies, which  sounds good until you real­ize that bring­ing a cam­era into a movie the­ater is fed­eral offense. 4. Depict a restau­rant, which we couldn’t do because we didn’t know any­one who owned a restaurant.

Hard pressed for ideas, we went down stairs for some nour­ish­ment when Mike Busch walked by and exclaimed some­thing silly like “You know what would be great, just have a guy pee­ing on a case of Pepsi and at the end of it have big let­ters that read “FUCK PEPSI”. Upon hear­ing that, we all knew that Mike was on to some­thing. We jumped in the car, bought a case of Pepsi (we didn’t have Pepsi on hand because it sucks and no one in my house drinks it), returned to the house, and quickly began shooting.

Our idea was a bit more com­plex than our decathlon com­mer­cial. It enthralled cap­tur­ing a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent angles and shots in order to prop­erly express the idea. Plus, we had to bring in some spe­cial effects work, which included using a hose to sim­u­late a pee stream. After a solid hour of shoot­ing we got all of the nec­es­sary footage, strung it together in a half an hour, and we were done with our com­mer­cial. While we were proud of the final result and con­fi­dent that it would win, the com­mer­cial did have some bla­tant flaws that we didn’t think the Coke com­pany would appre­ci­ate. We thought that pee­ing on a Pepsi sequence was fine, but the biggest issue was the fact that our com­mer­cial didn’t take place in any one of Coke’s four ridicu­lous loca­tions. Thus, we decided to make another com­mer­cial just to be on the safe side.

Our sec­ond Coke com­mer­cial involved Thomas and his girl­friend, Lau­ren, watch­ing the movies at home. At first, Thomas and Lau­ren are awk­wardly watch­ing the movie, Thomas tries to make a few moves, but Lau­ren shuts him down. Then Thomas drinks a Coke, Lau­ren smells it, and bam they begin to make out. The idea was pretty good, it was a funny, appealed to a lot of peo­ple, and it incor­po­rated one of Coke’s four locations.We shot for about half an hour, put the footage together, and quickly sub­mit­ted both com­mer­cials to the con­test just before the deadline.

All in all, I think we had a very suc­cess­ful day. I found that film­ing com­mer­cials  is a lot eas­ier than film­ing a whole movie, they’re shorter, sim­pler, and often eas­ier to do a qual­ity job on, and yet they still develop the fun­da­men­tal skill-sets needed to make suc­cess­ful movies. In other words, if one is hard pressed for time, and wants to become a film­maker, they should make as many com­mer­cials as they pos­si­bly can. We lit­er­ally spent about five hours total mak­ing three com­mer­cials, which isn’t bad con­sid­er­ing that shoot­ing a scene for some of our movies can take a whole day. The hard­est part about mak­ing these com­mer­cials was the fact that we had trou­ble com­ing up with the ideas for them, which isn’t bad at all con­sid­er­ing that we were start­ing cold turkey.

Big props to every­one that was involved with mak­ing these. Thomas and Kevin were help­ful and a plea­sure to work with. Lau­ren was very pro­fes­sional, espe­cially for a female. She was prompt, polite, and didn’t mind mak­ing out with Thomas a few times on cam­era, even though it was incred­i­bly awk­ward for both of them. I really appre­ci­ated this con­sid­er­ing the “I can’t spit Martinelli’s out of my mouth with­out get­ting sick” or the “I’m tak­ing an emer­gency trip to Mex­ico” excuses that females have pre­sented to me when mak­ing movies. Mike Busch also gets credit for com­ing up with the funny idea for our first com­mer­cial. All in all, I’m proud of what we did with just a few hours of effort, for a lot of peo­ple this may look like crap, but I actu­ally think it’s a tes­ta­ment to our effi­ciency and improv­ing effec­tive­ness at cre­at­ing films.

Oh and for some rea­son, peo­ple absolutely loved our decathlon com­mer­cial, even though I per­son­ally think it sucked. Just goes to show that some­times peo­ple either have ridicu­lously high expec­ta­tions, or none at all.