Project - Barzhini Commercials

Three or four weeks ago Sean and I started working with a local marketing company, called Barzhini! Marketing Ventures. Owned by Tonya Hall, Barzhini does mostly social media advertising, such as through Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, etc. Tonya was interested in commissioning us and bringing us on as part of the Barzhini team. But, before we started working with her clients, some of which are very recognizable brands such as Kodak, Disney, and McDonald's, we had to prove ourselves. This is totally reasonable, of course, because Sean and I are so young. People would be crazy not to question us. So - we decided to sign on for a project; to film a series of advertisements for Barzhini itself.
 

After much brainstorming with Tonya, we came up with a fun concept. The basic idea was "how are your marketing decisions being made?" We did this with a series of hilarious commercials focusing on a "rival" marketing firm and all of their hilarious and ridiculous decision-making processes. Rock-paper-scissors, flipping a coin, fortune cookies, chugging contests, etc. For such a simple idea, we knew that the success of the ads would depend largely on the casting.

But, how do two 18 year old kids set up a casting call with no funding? Let me just say this - Craigslist is your friend!

We held two casting calls for local actors and actresses, and found everybody we needed to fill our 7 very specific parts.

Mr. Richards - Eric "Denim" Peterson

Dennis - Mark Bittle

Todd - Troy Schermer

Stuart - Tucker Wannamaker

Janet - Lori Guinn

Mark - AC Earing

Alex - Austin Martinson

Dennis was a position formerly named Denise, and was cast to a woman. However, she wasn't down with not getting paid, and opted out of the project. Her loss I say!

Sean, being the genius that he is, wrote a full script in a matter of hours. This was actually starting to become a full fledged production.

We had one night where we all met up. Everybody met everybody else, we talked, reviewed the script, ran through it a few times, and just hung out. It was a great opportunity to get the cast to mesh just the way we needed to.

Friday, Feb 19th finally came around. We met up at 6:30am on location. We used a donated board room at a local company, Photo Stencil. The room was awesome, and so were the folks at Photo Stencil.

Now, with 2 Trons, 2 Atlases, 1 Icarus, Ricochet, Sonus, 2 Cronuses, 4 Echoes, (see previous blog entry for names) a professional makeup artist, a professional sound tech, 6 actors, an actress, a producer, a director (Sean), a 1st Assistant Director (Me), our buddy Jazz Band (Aeron Remund), an intern, and another Barzhini associate there, we were ready to rock. Ten hours of filming later, for the first time in a professional setting, Sean called out, "That's a wrap!" The talent meshed incredibly, and each pulled off their part better than we could have asked for. Photos from the shoot can be viewed at: http://s591.photobucket.com/albums/ss357/Denimpete/whole%20wheat%20commercial%20shoot/

To the editing room!! We expect to have the final product ready for presentation to Barzhini in about 2 weeks' time. In the process that is "us becoming legends of film," I consider Stage 1 to be underway!

It's only a matter of time.