A yoga mat is the star of a viral video created and produced by Portal A for Kimpton Hotels. Meet Mat (A Yoga Love Story) opens on a woman, Sheri, sitting on a bed in a hotel room surrounded by piles of work. She is at a Kimpton Hotel on business, and it looks like she isn’t going to see the light of day. But Mat, the complimentary yoga mat in her room, convinces her–yes, he talks–to take advantage of the hotel’s wellness amenities, and soon they enjoy everything from a bike ride to a massage to a dip in the pool to a delicious dinner.
It’s a bizarre scenario yet the two-minute YouTube video is oddly engaging. “Typically, clients come to us with the idea that they want to be a little edgy or a little different,” said Kai Hasson, the creative director of Portal A, a San Francisco and Los Angeles-based creative production company that produces video specifically for online distribution.
In this case, Kimpton Hotel’s marketing team wanted to do something unusual to promote its new yoga program as well as the idea of the hotel chain as a destination for overall wellness. It took a few iterations to get the Mat character just right, though. Mat was initially destined to be a real Latin lover with a Spanish accent, inspired by the suave artist Javier Bardem played in the Woody Allen movie Vicky Cristina Barcelona. But that felt clich๏ฟฝ, and the creative team went in a different direction, creating a yoga mat that was still suave but with a voice like that of Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy’s newsman character and big eyes and a big mustache.
Charmingly creepy Mat, who was brought to life by the VFX crew at Seattle’s Cinesaurus, is charming, but there are times when he is, well, a little creepy. “There’s a creepiness factor that’s inherent there–he’s a yoga mat trying to woo a woman,” Hasson acknowledged, “and Kimpton was a little worried about the creepiness factor, and that was definitely warranted. In the end, we took everything down a notch, so it wasn’t there as much. But I think having a little bit of creepiness in the video actually makes it funny.”
It wasn’t easy finding an actress who could hold her own against a talking yoga mat. “We just couldn’t find the right person. We were looking for someone who looked like they had worked for awhile and maybe had one or two kids at home but was still going on business trips and looked tired on the job but could then totally lighten up,” Hasson said, “and she had to have comedic talent because we didn’t want the yoga mat to be the one shouldering all the comedy.”
Actress Rosemary Watson proved to be the perfect person to play Sheri, bringing a sense of delight to a day spent frolicking around a hotel with a yoga mat.
Meet Mat was shot at a Kimpton Hotel in La Jolla, Calif. in two days. Hasson directed; Jackson Myers was DP. Hasson tried to create a sense of fun during the shoot. “It’s important that you’re creating an atmosphere where people can have fun. That fun is reflected in your work. With Internet content in particular, people can sniff out when it’s not authentic,” Hasson observed.
That said, it was also a priority to work efficiently so that time could be set aside for improv and finessing those scenes that were more complicated to shoot. Hasson noted that he and Myers devoted extra time to constructing and shooting the scene that has Sheri giving Mat CPR by the side of the pool–the yoga mat dove right in even though he couldn’t swim.
The decision was made to have Myers break away from the steady camera work that dominates the spot and shoot this particular scene handheld. “It gave it a kind of Private Ryan, storming Normandy type of look,” Hasson said, “and Rosemary went crazy. It was all improv, and that was a good example of having the time and the space to fool around. It worked out great.”
Portal A’s Sari Tracht edited, and the biggest challenge was determining the right length for the piece. The first cut ran about 3:30, which felt way too long, Hasson said, so the opening scene was cut by half and a scene that had Mat at a wine bar with Sheri et al got tossed. “Short video works on the Internet, but ours tend to be a little longer than the average. Generally, we aim for about two minutes,” Hasson said, noting that it all comes down to what best suits the story.
