Top Spot Credits
CLIENT
Levi Strauss & Co.
PRODUCTION CO.
radical.media, bicoastal. Tarsem, director; Paul Laufer, DP; Frank Scherma, executive producer; Jay P. Flack, production designer; Steve Ross, producer. Shot on location.
AGENCY
Foote, Cone & Belding/San Francisco. Brian Bacino, group creative director; Suzanne Finnamore, creative director/copywriter; Chris Lisick and Susan Treacy, copywriters; Sean Mullens, creative director/art director; Kim Schoen, art director; Steve Neely, executive producer.
EDITORIAL
Spot Welders, Venice, Calif. Robert Duffy, editor.
POST
Pacific Ocean Post, Santa Monica, Calif. Jim Bohn, online editor; Stefan Sonnenfeld, telecine colorist.
AUDIO POST
RavensWork, Venice. Robert Feist, mixer.
MUSIC
Elias Associates, bicoastal. Jonathan Elias and Alex Lasarenko, composers.
SOUND DESIGN
Primal Scream, Santa Monica. Reinhard Denke, sound designer.
There’s a theory that you can link anybody in the world to someone else by tying them together through 16 intermediaries who cross each other’s path in one way or another. Levi’s played on that idea when it launched the largest advertising campaign in the brand’s history Aug. 4 with a series of six interconnected spots directed by Tarsem via Foote, Cone & Belding/San Francisco, suggesting that everyone in America is connected by their jeans.
The hilarious :60 “Car Chase,” which spoofs that action-movie staple, is the second in the series, which ends with the tag, “they go on.” Shot on location in New York, it opens with the closing shot of the preceding spot, “Impala Man,” which shows an attractive woman in jeans with a European accent buying a hot dog from a street vendor for a blind man’s seeing-eye dog. “Car Chase” continues as a delivery van for the Happy Joy Chinese restaurant pulls up and blocks the woman from view. The scene quick-cuts to the Happy Joy storefront in Chinatown, where a handsome young cabbie in jeans stands by his taxi, reading. Next, a nerdy-looking guy on a moped snatches a hanging smoked duck from a rack in front of the restaurant. The shopkeeper yells, and a plainclothes cop waves his badge, gets in the back of the cab and tells the cabbie to pursue the thief.
Thus begins a slapstick parody of big-screen car-chase scenes–including the infamous French Connection scene in which the cars zoom beneath an elevated subway track–complete with SWAT-like music. It’s clear that this is the opportunity the young cabbie has always dreamed of–and he’s not going to let the fact that he’s chasing a wimpy moped keep him from making the most of it.
After about the fifth outrageous spin-out the cop–having noticed pictures of Starsky and Hutch and Kojak on the dashboard–says, “It’s just a misdemeanor–you can let him go.” But the cabbie peels out again, as an elderly Chinese woman looks on. (This woman is the opening of the next spot in the series, “Ice Cream Man.”)
Tarsem, who directs out of bicoastal radical.media, has already made some award-winning spots for Levi’s, notably “Pool Boy.” But he said the production of this campaign was particularly intense, because the client wanted to have the spots ready for the August back-to-school season. As a result, he explained, there was much more agency collaboration during the shoot than he normally allows, and less preplanning than on a typical Tarsem project.
“It was the most input I’ve ever taken on a shoot, because I accepted the job before everybody knew what we were going to do except the base idea,” the director said, adding that creative-team input was critical to the success of these spots, particularly with “Car Chase,” because the team kept pushing for “the tacky stuff of the ’70s cop shows–they were brilliant.”
Asked why the moped’s driver steals the duck, Tarsem said: “You tell me. If we had followed his story from the beginning maybe we would know, but we enter these stories following people wearing jeans, which in this case was the cabbie.”
The idea behind the spots, Tarsem said, was to leave the viewer dangling. “The next time you pick [the story up], it becomes clearer,” he noted. “But every time you finish [one of these] ads you question, `Well, now what’s this person’s story?’ ”
FCB group creative director Brian Bacino added that the campaign “shows one little life connecting to another little life, capturing a moment when someone is peaking creatively.” In the case of “Car Chase,” it’s the fulfillment of the cabbie’s lifelong dream to drive in a movie-style chase scene.
It’s hard, Bacino noted, to pick one spot from the group and know what it says. But by the end of the year, he added, “we’re hoping people will feel like Levi’s is for people who do their own thing.”
The TV spots are part of a national print, television and cinema campaign.
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Shadowrock Cooks For Wienerschnitzel
CLIENT
Wienerschnitzel.
PRODUCTION CO.
Shadowrock Productions, Beverly Hills, Calif. Oscar Bassinson, director; Tim Eaton, DP; Wendy Littlefield, executive producer; Kathryn Bishop, head of production; Kevin Donovan, producer. Shot at Ben Kitay Studios, Hollywood.
AGENCY
dGWB Advertising, Irvine, Calif. Mandi Dossin, partner; Jon Gothold, partner/creative director; Joe Cladis, associate creative director; Amy Krause, producer; Tiffany Smith, production supervisor; Doug Koegeboehn, account executive.
EDITORIAL
Avenue Edit, Santa Monica, Calif. Andrew Borton, editor.
POST
Avenue Edit. Andrew Borton, editor. Hollywood Digital, Hollywood. Steve Rodriguez, colorist.
AUDIO POST
AudioBanks, Santa Monica. Sonia Castro, mixer/engineer.
MUSIC
Ear to Ear, Santa Monica. Brian Banks, composer.
THE SPOT
The :30 “Anointed” opens as dawn breaks across the Serengeti, where the ground is covered by a thundering herd of hot dogs. Subsequent scenes reveal hamburgers and french fries on the move, with the entire throng converging on a pot of chili. The voiceover notes that “each year 59 million gather to be anointed,” and adds that customers can now “get a Wienerschnitzel chili cheese dog and chili cheeseburger for just two dollars.”
Spot broke in June
