Director Baker Smith of harvest, Santa Monica, and the visual effects crew from New York’s Quiet Man play with fire to great comedic effect in a new :30 for Dairy Queen titled “Inhaling.”
The work of a Grey, New York, creative team made up of executive creative director Jonathan Rodgers, creative director/art director Steve Krauss and creative director/copywriter Ari Halper, the spot opens on three co-workers sitting around a table enjoying lunch at a Dairy Queen. The scene appears normal until they start talking, and we realize that they are actually inhaling as they speak. “This Chicken FlameThrower Sandwich is amazing,” guy number one says.
“Yeah, but why do we have to inhale when we talk?” the woman seated next to him asks.
“Trust me, if you exhale, flames will shoot out of your mouth,” guy number two nervously warns.
You can’t help but gleefully anticipate what is going to happen next. Guy number one speaks without inhaling, flames shooting out of his mouth, and his panicked co-workers ultimately do the same, creating a hysterical scene.
“Inhaling” is aimed at eaters who want to be challenged by something hot, according to Grey executive creative director Jonathan Rodgers, who notes “Inhaling” is a sequel to a Dairy Queen commercial from three years back. That spot, called “Napkin,” found guy number two from “Inhaling” (actor Brian Stepanek), eating a FlameThrower Burger in his office. It is so hot that when he wipes his mouth with a napkin, the napkin catches on fire. He drops the napkin on his desk, torching a stack of papers, and soon enough his entire office is ablaze.
Smith, who has directed the Dairy Queen campaigns for four years, said “Inhaling” presented two challenges to him as a director. “Finding people who could inhale and speak at the same time is the most obvious, and the second was assuring the agency that I wouldn’t burn down the Dairy Queen store [in Bloomington, Calif.] where we shot the spot,” Smith said laughing.
There was some real concern because Smith brought in a special effects guy with a real flamethrower. “That’s when you go, ‘Man, this is a great job!’ ” Smith enthused.
More on the fire play in a moment.
Before any of the fire sequences were shot, Smith and DP Curtis Wehr shot the actors safely away from the flames. Given that they weren’t really spitting fire at each other, the actors were performing something quite like a choreographed dance sequence, reacting to essentially nothing but imagined flames.
Sound check
Smith noted that even without the flames, he could see the spot coming together while it was being shot. “I always do a sound test. When I watch stuff, I’ll turn the sound off, and if I laugh, I know it’s a good spot,” Smith says. “Even if it is a dialogue spot, you can just tell by the subtlety of an eye twitch or whatever.”
To keep his talent going through numerous takes, Smith needed to keep their strained vocal chords hydrated. “There was a constant supply of water being ushered in to the set. [Talking while inhaling] is not an easy thing to do. You can do it for short periods, but to sustain it for a whole conversation is tough, and it is a commercial–we don’t just do it in one take and move on,” Smith said, noting, “We do it until it’s perfect–then we do one more.”
Once Smith wrapped with his talent, it was time for a little flame throwing. A black backdrop was placed behind the table they sat at. Smith then carefully positioned the guy with the flamethrower exactly where each of the actors had sat and had him shoot short bursts of flames. One has to ask: Why not just create CG flames later in post? “Whenever you can use a real element, you always should,” reasoned creative director Johnnie Semerad of Quiet Man, New York, stressing, “This had to be believable or the humor wouldn’t work at all.”
Back in New York, Jake Jacobsen of Crew Cuts edited the spot. Smith praised Jacobsen for creating the kind of “rapid fire pace–no pun intended” the spot called for. Then Semerad and his visual effects crew went through the hundreds of fire takes to find the blasts that best lined up with the performances.
Fine touches There were also lots of smaller touches that had to be made. “Little things like when the fire comes out of the guy’s face, his face would have to light up, or when the fire got closer to the other guy’s shoulder, his shoulder would light up,” Semerad explained. “All that stuff, we went in and did by hand with a color correct. So it was not only lining up the fire with the background plate, you then had to match the background plate by brightening things up to make everything seem perfect.”
The process was painstaking and took weeks but yielded amazingly realistic results. While the effects are smokin’, the performances of the actors featured in the spot–the aforementioned Stepanek as well as Annie Hoff and Ken Kobus–are also standout. “Brian is a great improv actor and funny, so it was surrounding him with people who equally had the timing, and the guy and girl we cast did a great job,” Smith praised. “They were believable and not goofy.”
“Inhaling” has caught fire–so to speak–on YouTube, by the way. Several average folks have gone to the trouble to post the spot and have given it high rankings. This doesn’t surprise Rodgers, who says, “It’s a populist campaign, something that people from eight to 80 embrace.”
