You’ve got to love a great sight gag.
A new :30 for Stride chewing gum created by JWT, New York, and directed by John O’Hagan of RSA, Los Angeles, has a particularly well-executed sight gag at its core.
As the spot, which is titled “Office Park,” opens, we see a guy absentmindedly yakking away on his cell phone and chewing gum while crossing the street. He is distracted and almost steps out in front of a car.
Turns out he faces another, more unexpected danger–from out of nowhere a ram crashes into the guy, taking him down and knocking the gum right out of his mouth.
We’re then treated to an instant replay of the cringe-inducing impact (the guy gets it directly in the groin). The action freezes, and text on the screen and a voiceover tell us, “Spit out your Stride gum and chew another piece already! Or we’ll find out.”
The action picks up with a Stride van screaming onto the scene, and two Stride employees confiscating the chewed gum then fleeing.
The Stride guys are in such a hurry that they choose to leave their attack ram behind.
“Office Park” and two other new commercials in the package mark an evolution in JWT’s campaign for Stride, noted JWT executive creative director Jeff Bitsack. While the previous incarnation of the campaign found Stride having to temporarily shut down its factory because people didn’t need to buy as much gum given its ridiculously long-lasting flavor, the new campaign finds “these brilliant minds at Stride taking matters into their own hands and forcing people to spit out the gum,” Bitsack explained.
The campaign continues to be “deliberately goofy” in tone because the 16 to 25-year old demographic Stride is after responds to that kind of humor, added JWT creative director Jackie Hathiramani.
But JWT couldn’t just hire a comedy specialist to direct “Office Park” as well as the two other spots in the campaign. There was also a need for a director who could handle action as well. “We didn’t want to risk the action in this to somebody who didn’t know how to handle it,” Bitsack said.
“It needed to look like an action movie,” Hathiramani stressed.
O’Hagan, who has proven adept at both comedy and action, won the job based on those strengths.
In-camera approach For this part, the director was determined to capture the stunt at the center of “Office Park” in-camera. “These days as special effects advance there is a tendency to take difficult shots and put them off onto post, but I’ve always really believed in trying to capture as much as I can in-camera,” O’Hagan said.
With that being his goal, O’Hagan hired a trainer, wrangled some rams and cast stunt man/actor T. Ryan Mooney to take the big hit. The trainer, the rams and Mooney spent two weeks perfecting the stunt before the commercial was shot on location in Los Angeles.
That said, O’Hagan was prepared to instead go the visual effects route if need be, with a blue screen and rigs on standby just in case the rams didn’t perform as rehearsed.
But the rams delivered five great takes in just a few hours.
How did the trainer get the rams to go after a person? “In the case of rams, they are so territorial that this stunt guy, who was great working with them, would go forward into the ram’s territory, and then back up,” director O’Hagan explained. “Finally, the ram would have enough and just nail him.”
As shocking as it is to see on film, it was even more startling to witness the severity of the hit in person. “There was a collective gasp every time the ram hit the guy,” Hathiramani said, noting that the impact was so forceful it cracked the protective cup the stunt man was wearing.
Ouch!
While getting the actual hit was crucial, O’Hagan also paid close attention to detail in shooting the events leading up to the ram attack, giving us a little scare when the man almost gets hit by a car. “It makes the ram seem even more out of left field,” O’Hagan said.
Gum shot
Dave Anderson of New York’s Mackenzie Cutler edited “Office Park.” In addition to squeezing a lot of story into a mere :30, the editor also had to find a way to make sure viewers understood that the guy was hit so hard his gum flew out of his mouth. “We decided in the edit that it had to be a freeze shot,” Hathiramani said, noting, “That was an important part of the message. We had to show why the ram is attacking the guy. That had to be emphasized and punctuated.”
By the way, it should be noted that there are more elements in this campaign to come. In addition to the three spots O’Hagan directed, we’ll also soon see a series of :15s that will have lawyers going after Stride for causing harm to innocent citizens (these are fictional lawyers, of course) and instructing victims like the guy who was nailed by the ram to visit a yet-to-be launched website where they can either settle or sue.
