Deutsch Los Angeles teamed with director/DP Lance Acord last year to wow Super Bowl audiences with the Volkswagen Passat spot “The Force.” The commercial was so successful–it was a SHOOT Top Spot, topped many favorite Super Bowl spot lists and has been seen by more than 50 million people and counting on YouTube–that the pressure was on to make another standout piece of work this year. And the agency and director delivered just that with the :75 “The Dog Strikes Back.”
Set to the James Brown classic “Get Up Offa That Thing,” the commercial centers on a fat pooch inspired to get in shape so that he can chase a new Volkswagen Beetle down the street.
“The spot is about getting back out there and finding that excitement again in your life,” according to Deutsch LA group creative director Matt Ian.
In creating “The Dog Strikes Back,” it was crucial to include a nod to last year’s “The Force” because people expected it, Deutsch group creative director Michael Kadin pointed out. (And the Star Wars link was teased in “The Bark Side,” released on YouTube prior to the game.)
But Kadin also stressed that it was important to create a spot that could air after the Super Bowl.
“We always say that if we do a good enough spot, then it can become a Super Bowl spot,” Kadin said, “and if we stay in the real world, it can run the rest of the year.” With that strategy in mind, “The Dog Strikes Back” included a tip of the hat to last year’s “The Force” via a cantina scene attached to the end. But the commercial works quite well without the addendum, and post-Super Bowl airings do not include this additional footage.
In the final seconds of the commercial as it aired during the Super Bowl, we see that “The Dog Strikes Back” is being watched–and critiqued–by a bunch of aliens in the famed cantina from Star Wars. Darth Vader makes an appearance, too, although this time around, it is an adult in the suit, not Max Page, the little boy from “The Force.”
Open bar Lucasfilm gave Acord the actual floor plans and drawings from the original cantina set so that he could build a replica on a soundstage at Universal Studios, Los Angeles.
“They were very open to how we wanted to do it,” Acord said of the people from Lucasfilm, noting, “They recommended that we utilize some of their assets in the form of digital assets, maybe even doing digital composites where we would take the background from the existing film and shoot on green screen and comp our characters in. But there were a couple of things working against this idea: We had a tight edit schedule and post schedule that would have made it difficult to do in time. Plus, I really wanted to try some different things, different ideas, so we went ahead and built the set, and they were very generous in terms of offering use of the original material.”
Meanwhile, Acord was able to procure recreations of the alien costumes from Tom Spina Designs, New York.
The director/DP shot the cantina scene in one day on 35mm film. “I felt like that would best blend with what had been done [in the film],” Acord said. And when it came time to do the three-day shoot in the Chapman Woods neighborhood of Pasadena, Calif. with the canine star of the spot, Acord opted to shoot with the ALEXA, which gave him the luxury of just being able to let the camera roll.
The eyes have it The dog is a St. Bernard/Australian shepherd mix named Bolt, and his eyes got him cast. “He had this sad, soulful look about him, and I thought that was important in developing the emotional arc,” Acord said. “You get a sense of self-loathing and disappointment from the dog that he’s let himself go this far.”
Bolt is actually in great shape, so Acord employed Creature Effects, Los Angeles, to create a fat suit for the dog. “We had set out to cast a dog that had a lookalike, so we were looking at purebred dogs like Goldens and Labs, dogs where you could find a fat one and a skinny one that looked a lot alike, but that got to be hard. It’s hard enough to find one good dog that you can train in a short stretch, but then to have to find two or three that would represent different stages of being overweight, and training one as well as another, that just wasn’t going to work,” Acord explained. “Then we found Bolt, and he is such a great dog, and we were like, ‘Alright, how are we going to figure this out so we can use just one dog?’ “
Relying on post effects was briefly considered, but then it was determined that the schedule–the spot was shot in December–didn’t allow enough time. So, in the end, the fat suit was the best option.
Wearing the contraption didn’t impede Bolt’s performance at all. “He was amazingly focused,” Acord praised. “He had a good attention span–better than some actors I’ve worked with.”
