BBDO New York Goes Room To Room, Creates A Warm Image Spot For DirecTV
By Christine Champagne
If you grew up watching television, you can’t help but get nostalgic when you see “Forward” (:60), a new spot for DirecTV. Created by BBDO New York, directed by Noam Murro of Biscuit Filmworks, Los Angeles, and featuring visual effects produced by Method Studios, Santa Monica, the spot follows one man’s journey through life–with the one constant being television–in what appears to be one continuous shot through a series of rooms.
As the spot begins, the subject is a child in the 1950s, sitting in a living room watching I Love Lucy with his grandfather. Ultimately, the spot concludes in the present as the man–now a grandfather himself–watches television with his grandson in a living room.
In between, we see the main character move from room to room and decade to decade, growing up in the process.
Along the way, we also flash back to major moments in television as we see clips (or in some cases hear sounds) from classic shows (I Love Lucy and All in the Family among them) or televised events (ranging from astronaut Neil Armstrong walking on the moon to slugger Mark McGuire breaking Roger Maris’ homerun record).
“Forward” ends with DirecTV’s new tagline: Rethink TV.
CALLING ALL COUCH POTATOES
The creatives at BBDO strove to reach a wide–that isn’t a dig against couch potatoes, by the way–demographic with “Forward.” “The goal was to hit everyone that watches and loves TV,” Ari Weiss, BBDO associate creative director/copywriter remarked, musing, “It’s a weird product–television. We all love it.”
According to BBDO associate creative director/copywriter Dan Kelleher, the message “Forward” delivers is that “DirecTV is the future of television. We’ve seen television from its birth up to now, and now DirecTV is taking it from here. DirecTV is the next chapter in television.”
To help bring this ambitious vision to life, BBDO hired Murro to direct. “One of the big things that we worried about with this spot was that it wasn’t just about [the visual effects involved in] showing this guy grow up,” BBDO producer Andy Wilcox remarked. She noted that it was crucial to find a director who could also wring emotion out of the story.
Murro offered the complete package, according to Wilcox, who said, “He brings a humanity to everything that he does. If you watch Noam’s reel, it’s really about people and beautiful depictions of earthly life. The guy is brilliant.”
“It was a challenge,” Murro said of the assignment. “How do you tell the story of someone’s life in such a short period of time and in one continuous movement?”
Working closely with Method, Murro mapped out a plan. “This is one of those things that was thoroughly thought out. I kept saying to everybody, ‘It’s like a house of cards. If you move a frame–I’m not even kidding–the whole thing falls apart.’ So we had to pre-vis and pre-think everything to a tee in the pre-production phase,” Murro said. “It was a very elaborate process.”
Among the biggest challenges for Alex Frisch, lead visual effects supervisor at Method, was creating visually interesting transitions to show that the character was aging as he moved from room to room.
“We decided that morphing per se was only going to work for us once,” Frisch shared. “It worked with the first transition because you see the kid growing, and it tells you right away that the kid is changing age. So we did [the morph] first to establish [that he would be growing up along the way], but after that we wanted to hide the transition as much as possible with the action of the actor.”
FAST FORWARD
With a plan of action in place, Murro and DP Toby Irwin shot “Forward” over the course of six days mainly on stage at Universal Studios, Universal City, Calif., with bus depot and bar scenes shot on location in Los Angeles.
The spot was shot entirely motion-control, and only partial sets were built. Method later digitally created additional scenery.
Avi Oron of Bikini Edit, New York, edited “Forward” and also found stock music with a filmic quality that suited the anthem-like feel of the spot. “When we walked in the first day of the edit, he had that music against it,” Wilcox recalled, “and we never changed it.”
While Oron single-handedly chose the right track, it seems like everyone involved made a contribution in terms of helping to choose the classic television scenes and sounds featured in the spot.
Of course, everyone had opinions, but there were some choices that everyone agreed on, according to BBDO associate creative director/art director Jerome Marucci, who noted, “There were several must-haves, including I Love Lucy and the moon landing.”
Incidentally, “Forward” featured performances by Spencer Guidetti, Edwin Williams, Isaiah Airth, Miles Nolte, Mary Chris Wall, Sara Swain, Thomas Simmons, Kyle Chambers, Jillian Bach, Russell Jones, Skye Arens and Olivia Paradise.After 20 Years of Acting, Megan Park Finds Her Groove In The Director’s Chair On “My Old Ass”
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