No one wants to fumble a Super Bowl spot. So, youd think a producer working on not one, but two commercials set to air during the big game would be a bundle of nerves. But, surprisingly, VP/senior executive producer Keith Dezen of Boston-based Arnold Communications, was as cool as a cucumber when SHOOT spoke to him just one week before the game about a campaign he was producing for Hartford Financial Services.
Ill be honest with you, there is pressure. But you just have to do your job the same way you always do, Dezen says calmly. You just want the spots to be the best they can be, no matter what the venue.
At the time SHOOT spoke to Dezen, he had just returned from Australia where he had produced four spots for Hartford Financial Services. The two that aired on Super Sunday were Piano, which ran during the pre-game show, and Kangaroo, which aired during the third quarter of the game.
Both spots depict the potential for damage in the dangerous world we live in, and point out how Hartford Financial Services can insure us against disaster. Piano is set in a city and shows a piano falling from the window of a high-rise apartment, with examples of the destruction it could cause.
Kangaroo, the more original of the two spots, depicts the possible damage a runaway kangaroo can cause. The key word here is possible because in the spot the kangaroo is actually frozen in place just before any real damage can be done.
As the spot opens, the kangaroo has escaped from the zoo. Possibility number one, he flattens your car, says the narrator, as the animal comes close to landing on the roof of a car, frozen in mid-air before impact. Possibility number two, he flattens your hot dog stand, the narrator reads, as the animal is about to bound on top of a hapless hot dog vendors cart. Possibility number three, the narrator continues, he flattens your Great Aunt Edna. All along the way, the narrator notes that if damage is done, Hartford Financial Services is there to cover the cost with auto, small business and other types of insurance policies.
The point of Kangaroo and the campaign in general is simple. They wanted to show that they sell a broad range of products, not just car insurance, Dezen says, and they wanted to do that in a lighthearted way.
Touchdown
While Hartford Financial Services counted on the campaign to depict the companys diversity, Arnold, which had never done a Super Bowl spot before, was counting on the ad to catapult them into the limelight. Everyone is genuinely excited about the whole thing, says Dezen, an 11-year employee of the agency who has also worked on campaigns for Volkswagen (including the famous Sunday Afternoon spot) as well as Fleet Bank, Bell Atlantic and Stop & Shop.
Crafting top-notch creative came first, of course, with an agency team, including managing partner/chief creative officer Ron Lawner, executive VP/creative director Kathy Kiely, senior copywriter Chris Edwards and art director Amelie Barvenik, formulating the campaign. Insurance advertising can be, well, kind of stiff and dull, but the creatives at Arnold Communications opted for a more humorous approach.
Once the campaign was sold to the client, Dezen and his production staff, including assistant producers Ben Raynes and Lucy Herzog, undertook an extensive search for the right director. We looked at lots of directors, says Dezen. Obviously, Arnold Communications was looking for someone with experience, but enthusiasm was also key. Peter Cherry of New York-based Highway 61 fit the bill.
Peter had the biggest interest in the project. His enthusiasm was head and shoulders above the others, Dezen says. I was impressed by that when we first talked to him.
Once the director was chosen, the preproduction process got underway last August. By November, Dezen and a team of creatives and production personnel from Arnold headed to Australia where 12 days of shooting were scheduled. Why down under? Peter was there, and you get a heck of a lot more bang for your dollar in Australia, says Dezen. It also helped take the pressure off to be away from the harried atmosphere of New York and Los Angeles, as well as the office. I couldnt get 100 phone calls a day in Sydney, Dezen says.
As Dezen mentioned before, money was also a consideration, and Arnold, which solicited bids from post and visual effects houses here in the States, wound up staying in Sydney to do post because they got great bids from solid companies: Sydneys Winning Post Productions as well as visual effects facility Garner MacLennan.
Finding the right visual effects house was crucial given that the Kangaroo spot in particular included some complicated 3-D animation involving the marsupial. We used a lot of 3-D animation to create the kangaroo. To do fur is quite a difficult feat, Dezen points out. The effect, created by Garner MacLennan 3-D artist Larry Townsend; Henry/Flame operators Dominic Bean, Karen Fabling and Richard Lambert; and producer Kate Cunningham, is seamless in Kangaroo. Its impossible to tell the difference between the 3-D versions of the kangaroo and the real kangaroo.
Yes, a real kangaroo was also used, and if you think creating an animated kangaroo was tough, working with a live one was no picnic either. Theyre pretty untrainable, says Dezen, laughing. Cherry and crew shot the kangaroo in front of a greenscreen for one day. Everything went quite well, considering that kangaroos are temperamental animals.
Given the fact that kangaroos can be downright nasty, why did Arnold decide to work with a kangaroo as opposed to a cuddly koala? We were considering a rhinoceros, Dezen says. But then we went with a kangaroo. We wanted an animal that could escape from a zoo and create havoc and cause damage and be cute.q
