I wanted to go over the process for making commercials for those who were curious, and share a case study for review. Here it goes....

STEP 1: Get a client. If you belong to an agency, your given oppurtunities to pitch the client your vision of their prompt (very nice situation to be in). For everyone else, you gotta reach out directly to the client or advertise your video business. For those starting out, reach out to a local small company and create a commercial on "spec", meaning that you will do the commercial at low to no cost.

Congrats! 🎉 So you got the opportunity, now you need to make a pitch deck (this could be shared after or during your intro meet with client). Below is what I sent Suncoast. I kinda got ahead of myself and wrote the script. Usually this isn't the best idea, but I was really confident on the style and vision. 💅

I told client that this video was a true north for the script and to reference the visuals and energy.

So the script/pitch deck was approved, hooray! I started going into deeper location scouting and casting.

After all locations were locked, we scheduled a shoot date! It was a blast! Mark Arica was the legendary DP, Paul Bell was the PM, Alex Lalangan was the Gaffer, and Riley Smith was our Key PA/B Cam support. Oh, and that ice cream truck was spontaneous and not originally in the script, when we got to the skatepark noone was there so Mark being a genius stopped the ice cream lady and bribed her to stay and get some shots. Seriously, this was one of the top 3 shoots of my entire last 10 years in film and comm. You can't help but have fun when your crew is amazing ♥️

This was the final shot, Mark and Alex's approach to lighting blew my mind. We shiny boarded the subject tomatoes, and crushed the background in cam to create a deeper image. And here I was ready to leave the cam on "auto".

Sometimes we get scrappy, but we can still smile 😍

Perfect gaffer stance, what a legend that Alex is....

Oh yeah and here is the final video. Thanks for coming to my ted talk, goodbye 📽️

suncoast-market-anthem-video.mp4

P.S Apparently there's this rule that if you use Kodak 2383 as your LUT you're instantly "cinematic". Whatever keep making movies, thanks for reading this.