For years, the Milk Processor Education Program (MPEP) has maintained that the dairy beverage’s nutritional benefits promote healthy bones and teeth, and can even help a person’s body grow. In a new campaign created by Bozell New York, and directed by Luke Forsythe via Santa Monica-based Great Guns, MPEP links this longstanding brand message with the NBA’s Rookie of the Year contest for the first time. The spots focus on NBA rookie draft hopeful, 20-year-old Rashid Hardwick, whose nickname, "Seven and Change," refers to his towering height.
"Bounce" opens on a close shot of Hardwick in a gymnasium. The low camera perspective allows us to see him from the waist up, with the gym’s basketball hoop in the background. The thin young man starts playing with the basketball, passing it between his right and left hands as he mutters inarticulate phrases to himself. Then he dribbles the ball. It disappears below screen—but nothing happens for several seconds. No bounce can be heard, nor does the ball bound back into Hardwick’s hands. He looks a little bored, and crosses his arms, waiting. Finally, we hear the familiar-but-far-off sound of the ball hitting the floor. A few more seconds, and the ball reappears and the player catches it.
The male voiceover and supered text ask, "Want to grow?" As Hardwick dribbles the ball again, the message continues, "The calcium in milk helps." Hardwick rests his hands on his hips, again waiting for the ball to return to him. Cut to the "Got Milk?" logo and the words, "Proud sponsor of the NBA Rookie of the Year award."
A second ad, "Pants," focuses tightly on Hardwick’s size 16 foot and what appear to be yards of fabric draped over the top of his shoe, as he pulls—and pulls, and pulls—up his super-long warm-up pants. The campaign, which marks the London-based Forsythe’s U.S. spot directing debut, broke this month.
The Bozell creative team, including group creative director David Nobay, creative director/ art director Jan Jacobs and copywriter Dave Holloway, set about creating ads that would stand out from the sea of other NBA-themed spots. "We were very conscious that there’s a huge amount of NBA-focused advertising—all that high-octane Gatorade work and Nike," Nobay explained. "Milk isn’t necessarily the obvious player [in that field], so we needed something that stood out. We decided not to do frenetic sports advertising. These spots are simple and single minded."
While they explored various camera moves, and covered the shots in several different ways during production, in the end the team went with the "less-is-more school of thinking," according to Bozell’s director of broadcast production, Andrew Chinich. "One of the reasons [the continuous single shot] grips people is because of that hanging pause. We were conscious of not filling the gaps up."
Forsythe proved the right director for the job for several reasons. "Luke’s work stood out because there’s a freshness. He had done ninety-nine percent of his work in Europe, mostly in Amsterdam," Chinich noted. "And for a young guy, he had a built-in confidence and was not threatened by the simplicity of the spot."
"The only thing that could screw up the spot was its being over produced," added Nobay. "Luke’s reel is immensely unfussy. In every spot there’s a simple idea and he hasn’t been tempted to over-direct it."
For his part, Forsythe was drawn to the campaign’s silliness. "It’s not too far away from my taste, which [incorporates] a certain absurdity," he said. "The campaign also doesn’t shout, but makes the audience work a little. People don’t realize they’re waiting for the bounce until it doesn’t come. It’s a really articulate idea, and there are only so many of those."
Once they began filming, the challenge was making the staged sequence of events in "Bounce" look natural. The artifice of the situation wasn’t helped by Hardwick’s lack of experience on set. The player was to stand on a three-foot-high platform, and dribble the ball to one of two people standing below him off camera. That person would catch the ball, hold it, and then toss it back up.
The player also began ad-libbing to himself—in a sort of mumbling rap style—which Forsythe felt added to the commercial. "Letting him talk loosened him up and made the spot more interesting," observed the director. "It shows that there’s clearly something going through his mind, but the fact that you can’t tell what he’s saying adds a little mystery."
The spot’s being one continuous shot was a challenge in itself. For that reason, Forsythe was glad to have David Griffiths as his DP. "With a single thirty-second image, it had to have something seductive about it," Forsythe noted. That required a cinematographer who had a "great attention to detail." Griffiths had done a lot of food work, so he "could appreciate the small adjustments of lighting, the effect they had [on the film], and capture a certain realism. In the end, I was incredibly happy with the look. We used a high-speed [35mm] stock and underexposed it to get something quite rich and velvety."
Glenn Conte of Red Car, New York, cut "Bounce." Forsythe and Great Guns executive producer Tom Korsan declined to put a figure on the number of takes they had to choose from in the editing room. "I don’t think that’s a question we want to answer," the exec producer said jokingly. Even so, the main challenge in post was the sound design.
"Testing the positions of the bounce was the main question," Forsythe noted. "The ball bouncing is a sound that makes [the picture] absolutely truthful. The sound had to be far away. We had a serious amount of sound recorded. We left a mic recording in the changing room, so we could really get an authentic sound." Roland Alley of Quakebasket, New York, was the sound designer.
"At the end of the day, we faced a lot of visual questions," stated Nobay. "At every point there’s a method to what we’ve done, which, hopefully, made it look simple."
