Living rooms, dining rooms, bedrooms and dens fill themselves with beautiful, stylish furniture as the camera travels by them in a new campaign directed by STORY’s David Orr for VCF and SBC Advertising. The three spots make ingenious use of motion control/stop motion as empty rooms become populated with sofas, beds, tables, dressers and other handsome accoutrements as happy couples look on. VCF president Jonathan Schottenstein and other staff point out that the store provides both beauty and value. “Style doesn’t have to cost a bazillion dollars,” Schottenstein says.
The new spots pick up on an earlier series of ads, also directed by Orr, aimed at refreshing VCF’s brand and making the retailer more appealing to younger consumers seeking style and low prices. “The first spots were very colorful and brought a new energy to VCF’s advertising,” says Orr. “This time around, we went further, adding even more energy and creating animation in larger rooms with wider vistas.”
The illusions of the self-assembling rooms were created through a combination of stop motion and motion control techniques and required meticulous planning and art direction. “There were a lot of moving parts and they all had to be tied together in a seamless whole,” says Orr. “We needed to be very meticulous while shooting, because if we made a single mistake, we’d have to start over.”
The secret to making it work, the director adds, was to shoot in reverse. The production team started with fully furnished rooms, then removed one item at a time. In the finished spots, each sequence plays backwards. “Each sequence is designed so that the talent interacts with the very last item that appears,” Orr notes. “We wanted natural reactions so made sure they weren’t thinking about marks. It worked flawlessly, and kept the energy up.”
“Orr and the entire STORY crew were epic,” says SBC Advertising executive creative director Scott Mylin. Not only did they make $300,000 worth of VCF furniture look amazing, they did it with a little something called panache. Also, they pulled it off in the middle of a polar vortex that shut down the entire city of Chicago and made a complex shoot more complex. You’ve gotta love a director who will look you square in the eyeballs and tell you that frostbite is ‘not a problem.’ We couldn’t be happier with the result."
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