The history of Orange Julius, a frothy orange beverage developed in the 1920s, and its inventor, Julius Freed, are the centerpiece of a new campaign from space150/Minneapolis that features a viral film that documents the creation of the beverage by a man originally interested in cleaning pigeons.
Julius Freed: An American Original, the one minute and 25 second video produced by Shoot First Entertainment/New York, plays at www.juliusoriginals.com. It tells the story of “one of the most original inventors of his time,” who invented a pigeon shower before turning his attention to Orange Julius, the fruity, delicious beverage that is “a breakthrough in refreshment.”
“Our assignment was to push the original Orange Julius and we went to Wikipedia and found out about how he invented the pigeon shower,” said Riley Kane, associate creative director at space150. “We couldn’t make anything that good up, so we decided to base the film on the real facts. We made it look like a PBS documentary from the 1930s, but we took a few liberties, so viewers will understand it’s a pseudo documentary.”
The first liberty taken is the still picture of Freed that appears near the beginning of the film, which is actually the great grandfather of Zack Resnicoff, who directed and edited the film for Shoot First with J.C. Khoury. “There’s no existing record of what he looked like, so we made it up,” Resnicoff said.
The directors–the team of Zack & J.C. who operate Shoot First, which is repped by @radical.media–used archival footage at the beginning to show shots of Thomas Edison, the Wright Brothers and other famous inventors from the 1920s, “but all the rest was shot by us,” Khoury said. They desaturated the color from some of the film to produce vintage black-and-white segments, but other elements remain in color. In one scene, a black-and-white Freed mixes the beverage, which retains its orange color. “Any time we see orange, we left the color,” Resnicoff said. “We kept it natural because Orange Julius is about the freshness of the fruits.”
The film was shot in a mix of HD and Super 8 at 18 frames per second and played back at 24. “We mixed it to give it some validity and we undercranked it to speed it up so it looks like a film from that era,” Khoury said. They also added dirt and scratches to the film grain, “to give it the authentic feel of found footage. Super 8 film has the grain already built in, so all we had to do was put in the scratches and desaturate it in certain areas.”
They also built a portable pigeon shower “to mimic what it actually looked like,” he said.
The film was shot in September in the East Village, which provided a tenement alley, a rooftop and a water front location on the East River. “It looked like it could have been in Santa Monica, but everything was within a few block radius,” Resnicoff said.
The film, which began playing Nov. 20, now plays only at the website, but “our goal is to have it passed around, so it will play on YouTube and other sites,” Kane said. He also said a :60 second version of the film was made, “so it might run on TV, but for now it’s strictly online.”
He said Orange Julius, which is owned by Dairy Queen and operates about 400 retail locations in the U.S., is “a conservative client, but they embraced the idea that Julius Freed is not the typical founder. So they went with the idea for the video that shows the original drink and the original person who invented it.”
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