By Emily Vines

In a new spot for Nextel out of TBWA/Chiat/Day, New York, the idea is productivity. In “The Build” (:60s), construction workers move around a work site like ants building a hill.

From an opening shot high above the ground, the camera descends into the organized chaos of the construction zone. Here men swarm about, climbing a towering structure and hauling objects that weigh many times more than they do.

“It’s supposed to be a mess,” director Filip Engström said of the scenes. “But it turns out that a mess is a tricky thing to accomplish if you want to have a good mess.” For inspiration, Engström –who is with the StyleWar directing collective, which is represented via bicoastal Smuggler–studied nature films, like the French documentary Microcosmos, which takes a close look at the lives of insects.

StyleWar’s uncanny depiction of the bugs is especially apparent when a flatbed truck stops in the midst of the action. In an instant, men cover the vehicle and are unloading its goods. “I was thinking about if you dropped a little sugar cube in a group of ants [they would] all of a sudden, really quickly, crawl on top of it; so that’s the kind of feeling,” Engström related. “You put something among a group of ants and it takes one second and they are all over it, eating it or trying to deconstruct it.”

 

FROM THE GROUND UP

It was work that Engström had shot for Snickers and IKEA that indicated to the creative team that he was the right director for the job, creative director/art director Joel Rodriguez shared. “We noticed that he had a really good eye for working with CG and all of his stuff looked very believable,” assessed Rodriguez.

Although the spot incorporates visual effects, Rodriguez said they wanted to film as much as they could so that The Mill, New York, which handled the effects, could composite the work and have minimal computer modeling to do. The shoot lasted about two weeks.

The practical effects include one of the workers walking atop the heads of fellow co-workers who are seated for a break. A rig supported his weight allowing him to use their heads as steppingstones. And, the men who hang from a platform attached to a moving crane are actually performing the stunt. Of course, all of the actors’ loads were lightened with props that weighed less than the actual objects they resemble.

When construction workers needed to look as though they were ascending vertical beams and precariously hanging from the rising structure, they did so in front of a five-story blue screen housed in a hangar.

As the actors move about using the walkie-talkie, mobile credit card swipe, and inventory management features on their phones, a playful melody accompanies the action. “We worked hard to get music that would integrate and build throughout,” executive producer David Shapiro of Fluid, New York, shared. “The agency wanted something unexpected and a driving element to the spot.” Fluid’s Judson Crane composed the track.

In addition to the concept of productivity, a Nextel case study inspired this spot. The structure in the commercial is meant to be the Borgata Hotel Casino and Spa in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Two construction companies that helped build it were Yates Construction and Tishman Construction. Both used Nextel phones while building the Borgata and are featured in the commercial, as is the finished hotel.

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