What happens when an affable man asks a young woman for information about her breasts so he can inform her about a new bra-fitting website? If you watch Talking Headless, the new video ad for Zafu.com, you’ll find out.
The :52 video, now playing on a range of sites, is the first video ad for Zafu, a year-old site that provides personalized information about the proper bra for women who answer a few questions.
The spot was produced without an agency by Kontent Films/San Francisco, a production and development company. David Munro, the director who created the spot, cast it with John Dilley, another Kontent director, who plays the research scientist. “He’s nerdy and charming. If he was too rigidly scientific, it would take away from the humor,” Munro said. Chantal Carlon, a 10-time national Tae Kwon Do champion, plays the woman. “We canvassed the local karate gyms to find her,” he said. “For the role, she needed to be a kick boxer.”
In the spot Carlon literally kicks the head off Dilley after he asks her about her breasts. In a split second, we see Dilley’s head rolling along the parking lot, after a shot of his headless body is shown. “We shot it with the talent and swapped out full length dummies that had a model head based on the lead actor,” Munro said. “A shorter person wore a neck suit with shoulders built up to head height for the headless shot.” The alternative would have been to “throw a green screen over our unfortunate hero and do the headless bit in post but with too much realism it’s not funny, so we went very low tech.”
He shot the video with a Panasonic HVX200 camera with a mini-adaptor with prime lenses. The video was shot in Livermore, CA., “because it’s tricky to light in San Francisco, so we went outside the fog belt in the East Bay,” Munro said.
The video began playing at YouTube on August 28 and has been viewed over 15,000 times. It was seeded at 25 to 30 other sites, including Google Video, Grouper, Guba, Veoh, iFilm and Yahoo Video, according to Rob Holloway, Zafu’s CEO.
“Most people like the execution,” Holloway said, but he doesn’t know how successful the video will be yet. “It’s too early to say and you get polarized opinion.”
One thing it should do is prohibit men from asking women about their breasts. “We found it works better online,” the spot concludes, as Dilley’s decapitated head tries to inform another woman about the website.
“Atropia” and “Twinless” Win Marquee Prizes At Sundance Film Festival
The war satire “Atropia,” about actors in a military role-playing facility, won the grand jury prize in the Sundance Film Festival’s U.S. dramatic competition, while the Dylan O’Brien movie “Twinless” got the coveted audience award.
Juries and programmers for the 41st edition of the independent film festival announced the major prizewinners Friday in Park City, Utah.
Other grand jury winners included the documentaries “Seeds,” about farmers in rural Georgia and “Cutting Through the Rocks,” about the first elected councilwoman in an Iranian village. The Indian drama “Sabar Bonda (Cactus Pears),” about a city dweller mourning his father in the western Indian countryside, won the top prize in the world cinema competition.
“It’s for my dad,” said writer and director Rohan Parashuram Kanawade. His late father, he said, was the one who encouraged him to pursue filmmaking.
Audiences also get to vote on their own awards, where James Sweeney’s “Twinless,” about the bromance between two men who meet in a twin bereavement support group, triumphed in the U.S. dramatic category. O’Brien also won a special jury award for his acting.
The U.S. documentary audience award went to “André is an Idiot,” a life-affirming film about dying of colon cancer. Other audience picks were “Prime Minister,” about former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, and “DJ Ahmet,” a coming-of-age film about a 15-year-old boy in North Macedonia.
Mstyslav Chernov, the Oscar-winning Associated Press journalist, won the world cinema documentary directing award for his latest dispatch from Ukraine, “2000 Meters to Andriivka,” a joint production between the AP and PBS Frontline.
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