Who would have thought it: Videotape has entered the commercial production lexicon. Of course, what has been dubbed "electronic cinematography" would never replace film. However, there’s been much talk recently—especially in the wake of all the buzz around HDTV—of the benefits of using digital video formats such as Sony Digital Betacam to shoot commercials.
What exactly does digital video bring to the table? For one, it has an immediacy that makes it appropriate for documentary, real people and testimonial type spots. As image quality improves, it has become a viable and cost-effective acquisition solution, especially for shooting real people commercials.
There is a new series of spots—"Corn/ Las Vegas Direct," "Advantage Sport Insoles," "Magna Energy Insoles/Small Town" and "Advantage Work/ Highway Bridge Construction"—for Dr. Scholl’s foot products out of Messner Vetere Berger McNamee Schmetterer/EURO RSCG (MVBMS), New York. The spots, which focus on real people who use Dr. Scholl’s products, were directed by freelancer Brian Coyne through Travisano DiGiacomo Films, New York, and were part of a campaign that recently made the move from shooting on film to using video. Coyne has worked on the Dr. Scholl’s spots for the last three years.
"It was done exclusively on Digital Betacam, and is of remarkably high quality," says Frank DiGiacomo, president of Travisano DiGiacomo Films. "This is the third year we have done this campaign for Messner Vetere, and we had always done it on film. This year, we all agreed that we wanted to give it a different look. After exploring several options, Denis Harrington, the executive producer, and the director Brian Coyne felt that digi-beta would be a good call."
"We have always shot on sixteen-millimeter film," says Sandy Nelson, a producer at MVBMS. "This year saw a turning point in the campaign, because we have all been hearing about the qualities of Digital Betacam. People feel that the quality has gotten a lot better. There is also a certain cost factor associated with shooting on Digital Betacam. However, we certainly wouldn’t want to give up quality to get that."
Foot Issues
The Dr. Scholl’s campaign has used a real people approach for the last three years with much success. "I have been working on it for the last two years," says Nelson. "People really like the products a lot. That’s one of the great things about Dr. Scholl’s. When we go out and we give the products to people, they genuinely like them. They have great things to say about them, so it would seem like a natural type of product with which to do real people commercials."
How do they find the real people to participate in these spots? The process is more scientific than one would think, and is not without its challenges. "We have a company that does market research, and they go out and find people," explains Nelson. "When we want to do a specific commercial—with women who have corns, for example—that’s not so easy. We tell [the market researchers], ‘Here’s what we want to do: We want to shoot in Las Vegas, and we want to find one hundred women who have corns and are willing to talk to us about it. We’d also like these women to be in a certain ethnic, racial and age range.’ Then [the market researchers] go out and find those people [who fit the profile], and it’s all done under the auspices of product research."
The real people are from all over the U.S. According to Nelson, there are two Dr. Scholl’s vans that periodically travel the country to do demonstrations and to talk to customers about the product line. "The idea of the campaign has been that we go to different places and talk to people," he says. "We’ve talked to people in Miami about Dr. Scholl’s skin products, for example, and to people in San Diego about our sports insole."
The most important benefit gleaned from shooting in Digital Betacam for this year’s campaign was that it enabled the creatives to take a new approach to the spots. For example, in "Corn/Las Vegas Direct," a group of Las Vegas performers discuss how their spike-heeled shoes cause corns. The spot shows the Dr. Scholl’s van in the middle of a Las Vegas street, and the performers walking around their dressing room.
"We were looking to change the campaign a little bit," adds Nelson. "In the past, we have always interviewed people for the commercials in a fixed position—sitting on chairs in front of the Dr. Scholl’s van, for example. This year we wanted to follow people, and liked the idea of the mobility of the Digital Betacam. We were able to do that more easily, and with a smaller crew. It was less obtrusive. When we do the shooting, we try to maintain the idea that we are still doing this for product research."
Coyne and MVMBS shot "Advantage Sport Insoles" at The City of Los Angeles Marathon, where the advantages of utilizing video over film were apparent. "We were shooting some runners after the race, asking their opinion about our product," Nelson says. "It just freed us up to do shooting on videotape. We had to have cameras among the runners and all over the place. This would have been a much more difficult undertaking with film."
The increased mobility of shooting on video also came in handy in terms of moving from location to location. "The production is a lot like doing film, and we want things to look as good as they did on film," Nelson continues. "However, our crews are a little bit smaller, and we were able to move around so much faster. Usually with film, we wouldn’t move from one location to another. For example, to shoot ‘Corn/Las Vegas Direct,’ we were in downtown Las Vegas, and needed to move from one corner to another. We were able to do that in five minutes with video. With film, it would have taken us an hour."
Using Digital Betacam was a joint decision based on the experiences of both the MVMBS creatives and the Travisano DiGiacomo Films production team, though the agency had the final say. "They wanted to come up with a different look, keeping cost very much at the top of our minds," DiGiacomo recalls. "Denis Harrington had recently done a low-budget spot in digi-beta with a certain degree of success. So he brought up the subject with folks at Messner Vetere. There were also the mechanical aspects: It moves, there’s a lot of flexibility, and it’s less intimidating to the subjects."
"Our creative director had seen some of the equipment, and people were talking about what you could and couldn’t do these days [with digital video]," adds Nelson. "They were impressed by that in the beginning, and then it just seemed to apply to the kind of new spots we wanted to do. But we were most interested in what kind of quality we would get when we came back [from the shoot]."
According to Nelson, the agency creatives wouldn’t have been as happy with the campaign’s results if it weren’t for the process called Film Look, which projects what the footage will look like after film-to-tape transfer. "We studied the process and looked at what they had done," he says. "I can’t say that it makes the videotape look exactly like film, but we’re certainly happy with the results. Film Look imitates going from twenty-four frames of film to thirty frames of video. When you transfer film to tape, you only have twenty-four frames to make into thirty frames of video, so there is a little bit of a carryover from one frame to another. They do that to video, giving it the same effect."
Nelson says that Film Look was used because the agency didn’t want a dramatic change in the look of the Digital Betacam spots vs. previous efforts done on film. "The question of whether the immediacy of video was best for these spots has been put on the backburner for now," he says.
"We wouldn’t suggest that you do a high-end commercial such as Nike or Coca-Cola [on digi-beta]," says DiGiacomo. "But there are categories and sectors of the business that certainly are a perfect call for something like this. You go to Film Look once you have the digi-beta, and what can be done is really quite remarkable.".
