This year’s nominees for the Emmy Award for best primetime commercial represent a broad spectrum of styles. "Angry Chicken" for Nike Presto footwear features the absurd. "Fish" for the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) uses visuals and subtle humor. Both "The Osbournes" for Pepsi Twist, and "Sheens" for the Visa Check Card, use celebrities and humor to get their points across. And Volkswagen’s "Squares" is purely visual. The common bond all the spots have is great production. Below is a look at how the agency producers helped make these nominated spots happen.
"Angry Chicken"
Twice in the past three years, the Emmy has gone to Nike spots created by Wieden+Kennedy (W+K), Portland, Ore. This year, the agency is going for three out of four with Nike Presto’s "Angry Chicken," which has already won a slew of accolades, including a Gold Lion at the 2003 Cannes International Advertising Festival, an AICP Show honor, and Gold from the Art Directors Club. The spot, helmed by the directing collective Traktor of bicoastal Partizan, is a classic chase sequence with two twists—the guy being chased makes jumps and climbs that seem impossible but look completely real, and the chaser is an irritated chicken.
W+K producer Jennifer Smieja is effusive in her praise of Traktor’s handling of the spot. "Who else are you going to call when you have a script with an angry chicken in it?" she asks. "You have to have someone who is going to appreciate that kind of twisted and odd humor. [Traktor] grasped the oddity of it, but didn’t go over the top. They kept it very real."
Also key to the spot was the French performance art group Le Parkour, which Smieja describes as a troupe of urban athletes who specialize in moving quickly and fluidly through an environment. Sebastien Foucan, who played the man being chased by the chicken, and the rest of Le Parkour were brought in for the three-spot Presto campaign that also included the ads "Young Love" and "Scary Cat," which were all shot in the Paris suburbs.
"They use no harnesses, no mats," notes Smieja of the Le Parkour troupe. "They spend a lot of time prepping—mapping out what kind of movement they want to do, how they want to get from one place to the next as unconventionally as possible. They know what their bodies can take, and what kind of space they need."
It was important to the Traktor team that none of the athlete’s moves were faked, and that the camera was just there as an observer. "We weren’t sure how many jumps, rolls and leaps we would get from the athlete, so multiple cameras were used at all times," relates Smieja. "In the editing room, the directors were careful not to cut on the action so the viewer wouldn’t question whether he really did the move." (Rick Russell of Final Cut, New York, edited the spot.)
All in all, it was a fairly smooth project. In fact, Smieja says, the biggest hurdle was dealing with the French bureaucracy and neighborhood groups for location permitting.
"Fish"
Fallon, Minneapolis, and its former director of broadcast production Mark Sitley, have a good chance at winning the Emmy with the PBS spot "Fish," part of the ongoing "Be More" campaign. Two years ago, two PBS spots produced by Sitley and directed by Errol Morris of bicoastal/international @radical.media were nominated, and one of those ads, "Photo Booth," took home the statuette. "Fish" has already garnered a Bronze Clio, and a pair of AICP Show honors.
Sitley, who recently joined Euro RSCG MVBMS, New York, as partner/executive creative director of production, actually thought another PBS spot would be the one attracting the most attention this year. "Frankly, I thought the ‘Birds’ spot [directed by Francois Girard of Independent Media, Santa Monica] would be the breakout spot," he relates.
Alfonso Cuarón, also of Independent Media, directed "Fish" and a third PBS spot, "Naked Emperor." The nominated spot follows a CGI goldfish as he makes the journey from his glass bowl to the great outdoors, where he joins the salmon he saw on PBS jumping upstream to spawn.
While Cuarón broke out with his sexy feature Y Tu Mamá También, it was other work that helped land this job for him. "We were looking for people who had a strong point of view," Sitley says. "I think Alfonso’s remake of The Little Princess is one of the true masterpieces … a totally well-made, soup-to-nuts kind of movie. I was a real fan. There were also parts of his adaptation of Great Expectations—set pieces—that were just ravishing."
Sitley and the Fallon team also saw a passion in Cuarón, who is currently filming Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the third installment of the film series. "Working with somebody like Alfonso, who has that sort of Latin artistic sense, where passion is not precluded by rationality, was really an amazing kind of blessing for the concepts we had," relates Sitley.
Because the spot was so dependent on visual effects done by artisans at The Mill, London, the shoot itself required great discipline. "We had to work almost frame by frame, in so far as timing," Sitley explains. "It’s not the kind of spot you can find in the edit. We had to create it precisely to give The Mill its templates to create the very credible, but nonetheless artificial, goldfish. Alfonso, for all his passion, is clearly a master of technique. There was great precision to his point of view."
Cuarón and the Fallon team spent about 10 days in Prague shooting "Fish" and "Naked Emperor." "The shoot itself was radically under-funded and considerably ambitious, given the number of scenes we had to do, and [that we had] to make them work exactly in time," Sitley relates. "You had to have a technical bravura to make it seamless."
Sitley thinks the spot has a good chance of getting the award. "I find the work to be very inspirational, cinematic, empowering," he says. "The other spots are very graphic—not nearly as warm and cinematic."
"The Osbournes"
When Grant Gill, VP/executive producer at BBDO New York, first saw the storyboard for the Pepsi Twist spot "The Osbournes," he started laughing. "Hysterically," he adds. "I thought it was a really funny idea. You could visualize in your head what it was going to look like, and how Ozzy was going to react."
The spot, which continues the Pepsi Twist "unzipping" theme of celebrities changing identities, has Ozzy Osbourne’s kids, Jack and Kelly, morphing into Donny and Marie Osmond. The kicker is that Ozzy wakes up from that nightmare to find himself in bed with The Brady Bunch matriarch Florence Henderson instead of his wife Sharon.
The challenge of producing the spot for Gill was scheduling the shoot in the Osbourne home around MTV’s production of The Osbournes reality series. With no time to bid out the job to directors, Gill and the creatives made Bryan Buckley of bicoastal/international Hungry Man their first choice. "He was thrilled from the outset," recalls Gill. The Mill, London, was brought in to do visual effects, with the exception of the unzipping sequence, which was done by Quiet Man, New York.
"Once we got all those folks on board, the production went pretty smoothly," Gill says. "Sharon Osbourne was absolutely terrific in working it out with MTV to allow us into the house and be able to shoot there. We basically took over the house for a pre-light and two shoot days. Sharon made sure the kids were there on time and Ozzy was there on time. She was like the producer behind the scenes, making it all happen. As the producer, I will be eternally grateful to her for that."
Buckley and Gill are both fans of the MTV series, and used their familiarity with the Osbournes to fine-tune the spot. "Bryan’s sense of humor and his direction blocking out the shots for Ozzy in the house added a lot," Gill says. "Bryan came up with the idea of having Ozzy fumbling with a garbage bag when the kids walk in. The way he stumbles backwards and turns, that was all Bryan’s idea."
To hear Gill tell it, the shooting experience could easily have been an episode in the MTV series, what with bulldog Lola upchucking on a fine Persian rug when Gill scratched her back. "It was like I was suddenly part of the show," he laughs. "The first day we were shooting in the house, Bryan turned to me and said, ‘Do you realize, Grant, that you’re standing in the epicenter of American pop culture?’ Bryan was fantastic on the set, dealing with Ozzy and the kids and then Donny and Marie. That’s a real handful. He’s very low key and gracious, and he made it a real pleasant experience for everyone."
"Sheens"
When it comes to "Sheens"—the Visa Check Card spot starring Martin Sheen and his son Charlie Sheen—David Frankel, the producer on the ad for BBDO New York, can’t even recall who came up with some of the little bits that make the spot work. "I don’t remember now who thought of what," he says. "It was a very collaborative process."
Frankel, senior VP/associate director of television production at BBDO, does credit director Allen Coulter of Hungry Man, however, with much of the spot’s success. The commercial, one in a long-running campaign that compares the ease of using a debit card with the problems of writing checks in stores, exaggerates the time it takes to get a check approved by having Charlie age into Martin by the end of the spot.
Frankel immediately knew that the spot was something out of the ordinary. "There are certain times when a spot is so delightful and clever, and you combine it with that kind of star power, that you really have to figure that there will be a buzz around it," he says.
The Sheens, who had directorial approval, quickly hit it off with Coulter, who was suggested by the agency. "They were very pleased with Allen," Frankel says. "He has lots of experience in episodic television. Allen brings not only his professionalism and ability, he really created bits in the spot that were delightful. He’s fierce about the casting. The guy we originally wanted for the clerk was a little too over the top, so we kept looking and [eventually] found a guy who we all loved."
"Sheens" was shot in one long day in a video store, with most of the time spent on Charlie’s role in the spot. In the ad, the younger Sheen attempts to buy several of his own movies using a personal check, but by the time the check is finally approved, he has aged into his father.
Frankel, with 25 years of experience as a producer at BBDO, has worked with dozens of celebrities, and puts the Sheens among the easier ones he’s encountered. "Any spot with celebrities increases in cost simply because they require a certain amount of handling," he says. "The Sheens were very low key. It was very professional. They showed up when they were supposed to. They were not finicky. They were remarkably great as actors."
"Squares"
The strength of "Squares," the Volkswagen spot out of Arnold Worldwide, Boston, is the simple idea behind it. There are no celebrities, no big visual effects, no action, no humor. There is just the idea that a lot of the objects in our environment are square in shape, but not the Volkswagen (VW) Beetle.
"We kept the production simple, with the same simplicity that the concept has," says Keith Dezen, senior VP/executive producer at Arnold. "Because the idea was so strong, I always thought it was going to be award-winning." Indeed, "Squares" is the most lauded spot in contention for the Emmy, having won the Best of Show GRANDY at the ANDY Awards, a Bronze Lion at Cannes, four honors at the AICP Show, a Gold Pencil at the One Show, and a Silver Clio.
The spot shows a series of square objects, more than 30 in all, cutting faster and faster as the music builds to the final image of a refreshingly rounded VW Beetle in profile. Dezen talked to a number of directors before deciding on Malcolm Venville of bicoastal Anonymous Content. "Malcolm did a spot for us many moons ago, when the Passat was introduced," Dezen recalls. "He was just a laser beam in terms of the concept."
Venville’s background in still photography and his enthusiasm for the project were what sold the Arnold team. "That he was so hell-bent on doing the work—felt so strongly about it—made him the strongest choice for us," Dezen relates. "He was so enthusiastic about how to shoot it, and what to shoot. Sometimes as a producer I get worried about someone who is maybe a great director, but is phoning it in. I think that enthusiasm is worth a lot more than people might credit it for. That was refreshing about Malcolm."
Venville captured the various images over three days of shooting in Manhattan, the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, N.Y., and Jersey City, N.J. "We wanted to have a nice mix of office, industrial, house, interiors, and exteriors," Dezen explains.
It was Venville’s idea to shoot the various square objects in 16mm. "At first I wasn’t so sure about that, but retrospectively, I have to say it was a really cool idea," Dezen shares. "It makes the spot seem much more real and, in a strange way, it gives you the feeling when you look at those images, that [you’ve] seen that before, or know what that is. I suggested we shoot the last image of the Beetle in 35mm, and the rest in 16mm, and that’s the way we ended up doing it. It came out really well."
