When Livio Sanchez of The Lookinglass Company, Santa Monica and Chicago, was asked to edit Budweiser’s "Whassup/True" campaign, he leaped at the chance. The editor had viewed True, the short film upon which the commercials are based, eight months prior to seeing the storyboards for the spots. The film was the brainchild of Charles Stone III, the director behind the wildly popular ads. "I was the natural choice. I was the one who dubbed copies of the original short and starting handing them out to everybody at Lookinglass," explains Sanchez. "When DDB sent us the boards, I felt, ‘Who better to cut the spots than me?’ "
"Whassup/True" has become a pop-culture phenomenon. It earned a nomination for the Emmy Award for best primetime commercial, won the Grand Prix at the Cannes International Advertising Festival, was honored in the humor category at the Association of Independent Commercial Producers (AICP) Show at MoMA, and nabbed the Grand Clio at The Clio Awards. It also put Stone, of C&C Films/Storm Films Brooklyn, N.Y.awho directed, wrote and starred in both the short and the commercialsainto the world of feature films. (He’s now slated to direct a coming-of-age drama set in Brooklyn.)
For Sanchez, the "Whassup/ True" campaignawhich consists of the ads "Whassup/True," "Whassup/Call Waiting," "Whassup/Girlfriend" and "Whassup/Pizza Guy"aclearly represents his most celebrated editing achievement to date. It has also made his job even more difficult. "Expectations are definitely much higher now, and finding ways to exceed those expectations is that much harder," says Sanchez, who edits out of The Lookinglass Company’s Santa Monica office. (He also cut Bud’s "Wasabi," "Dream Girls," "The Message" and "The Game," the follow-up spots to "Whassup/True.")
Regardless of the challenge, Sanchez says he continues to take the same approach to every editing project: He finds the purest, most honest elements in the footage and then builds from there, one select at a time. "I don’t worry about trying to fit everything into that thirty-second world," he relates, "at least not initially. I spend a day watching the dailies, preferably alone, and look for that single, pure moment, whether it’s visual, a bit of comedy, or dialogueawhatever it might be. Once I have that in hand, I rough out the spot, which gives the director, the agency, whomever, something solid to work from."
With "Whassup/True," it didn’t take long for Sanchez to zone in on what the spot was ultimately about: friends communicating. Its purest element was just as obvious to Sanchezathe funny and realistic way it mirrored friends talking on the phone while watching television. The challenge was relating that realism and humor, staged originally for a short film, into a commercial format. "The product, in this case, was courageously played down by Budweiser, sort of left in the background," explains Sanchez. "My job was to speed up the pacing of the original short, without detracting from the integrity of the original work."
Sanchez worked closely with Stone throughout the initial editing stages. That collaboration, the editor believes, added significantly to the campaign’s ultimate success. "We would constantly exchange ideas, toss around different suggestions," he recalls. "We laughed a lot, but got a lot accomplished, and, more importantly, maintained the work’s honesty."
