Rack Room Shoes :30 Ad

In my non-linear post production class, all are assignments are given to us with all the footage, and it is up to us to turn it into something useful. These projects are "tests" that are given to prospective editors to assess their skill level and creativity.

For this project we had to create a 30 second ad (which of course means 29 seconds and 29 frames - that last frame is used to signal the next commercial). The add could not be any longer or we would lose points (makes sense to me). We were only told to use 3 computer graphics: "Smart Shoes" "Dumb Boyfriend" and "Rack Room Shoes" (The shoe company for which the commercial was made for in the mid 90's)

The premise: a daughter invites her new boyfriend out to lunch with her parents at a diner. The father is skeptical of the new guy, and the mom is trying to play peace keeper and just have a nice family outing. Meanwhile, the new boyfriend (Judd) engages the girl in some good ol' fashioned footsie. She gets up and leaves (probably cause she was getting too excited...) and Judd realizes that he was just feeling up Dad.

The difficult part came from culling together the right "scenes" of the commercial from literally hundreds of takes. The project was headed by a first-time director, and he didn't quite know what he wanted. So there were no less than 20 takes of the boyfriend walking into frame. It's kinda nice not having to go out and shoot once in a while...but at the same time, it was super frustrating knowing that these shots could have very easily been gotten without all this hassle. There were also entire sequences and lines that would have been impossible to include in the 30 seconds.

I chose the Black Keys' tune "Howlin' For You" (off of their latest album, Brothers) because the commercial was intended for girls in the south. The southern-blues song has the right mix of sexy and playful moods and has a fun sing-songy chorus. I made the graphics in Photoshop because I thought it would be a good idea to manipulate a single image of text and the arrow instead of using Avid's title tool and then creating another arrow. I also grabbed the Rack Room logo (thanks Google) and threw a light glow around the .png. I thought it turned out pretty good.

Keep in mind...this was shot in the mid 90's...so don't go blaming me for non-HD and whatnot.