By Christine Champagne

A clever new spot for King’s Hawaiian created by Energy BBDO Chicago and directed by Brian Billow of Anonymous Content finds a family sitting down for what appears to be an ordinary meal. That is, until they start going for the sweet rolls. Rather than reach out and pick up the rolls with their hands, they remain seated and literally vacuum them straight into their hungry mouths—the family dog even has the sucking technique down.

The humorous :30, which is titled “Sweet Roll Suckers,” actually marks the first time that King’s Hawaiian, a bakery based in California, has done a television commercial. “They really wanted to appeal to a broad market,” said Rowley Samuel, Energy BBDO Chicago EVP/head of integrated production. “What we found in research is everybody loves the rolls, but it’s not a very known brand. So the aim was just to get the name out there and to associate these great rolls with an actual brand so people recognize what they’re buying when they take them off the shelves.”

Billow was immediately drawn to the concept. “Pardon the pun, but it was fresh,” the director said. “In comedy, you tend to see a lot of the same jokes over and over.”

But when he first read the script, he wasn’t sure how he would pull off the trick of making it appear as though the people in the spot were really sucking those sweet rolls right into their mouths. “All I knew was it had to look real. It couldn’t look like a special effect if the commercial was going to reach its true potential,” Billow said.

He soon found a flawless way to make the spot work, mixing practical effects performed by puppeteers, who guided the rolls to the actors’ mouths using wires, with CG effects created by the artisans at MassMarket. “We travelled the buns from the bowl to their mouths pretty fast on set, as fast as humanly possible, and then later in post, we sped that up. MassMarket did a fantastic job getting the speed right and the trajectory right and making sure it felt like those buns were actually in the environment as opposed to animated in anyway,” Billow said, noting, “Special effects can feel ‘effectsy,’ and we were going for a more practical look.”

While the success of the spot relied heavily on people believing what they were seeing, Billow also knew that he had to get the performances just right, and he instructed his cast to play the situation straight when he and DP Igor Jadue shot “Sweet Roll Suckers” on location in a house just outside of Santiago, Chile, with production support from Santiago’s South Pictures. “That was crucial,” the director stressed. “When you have an outlandish idea like this, it’s crucial to surround it with real life. You don’t want the whole thing to be kooky. If everything is kooky, it just won’t be funny.”

Interestingly, “Sweet Roll Suckers” was originally envisioned sans dialogue. But former Energy BBDO CCO Dan Fietsam, who was heavily involved in the project before he departed the agency last February, insisted that there should be a story going on in the background, and while they were auditioning the actors, he and Billow developed the idea of having the dad complaining about the neighbor, who parks in front of his house, borrows his hedge clippers without permission and, ultimately, vacuums one of the King’s Hawaiian sweet rolls right into his mouth through an open window “to create another layer of texture—like a movie, a second layer of storytelling to ground the spot in reality,” Billow explained.

John Dingfield of Chicago’s Beast cut “Sweet Roll Suckers.” “John did a great job of balancing,” Billow remarked. “The big question was, how much of the dialogue and the backstory will we have? Will we be able to cut naturally knowing that we need six—or was it seven?—rolls flying. I can’t remember the final amount. But it was like, do we use all of the people that we shot vacuuming, or should we ramp up the dialogue a little longer? I think we ended up using all of the people and the animal that we shot vacuuming.”

Beyond balancing dialogue and storytelling with all that roll play, the editor also had to choose the best roll vacuuming performances. Billow shot various takes of the actors receiving the rolls, asking them to snap their heads back as if the buns had shot into their mouths at a fast speed. The director did that knowing that MassMarket would speed up the flying buns in post, and he wanted the editor to have performance options so that he could choose the best based on how fast the bun was traveling. “It was a back and forth process with MassMarket,” Billow said of the “so how fast should the bun travel?” deliberations. “Once they started speeding up the buns, we changed a couple of the takes, which is typical when you’re working with effects, and John did a great job with that.”

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