The Garage, a production company known for its tabletop acumen, has opened a new studio in Guadalajara, Mexico.
Co-owned by a collective of companies with a mission to create a Mexican production hub for visual storytellers, FFFRAME is the creation of partners at The Garage, Ool Digital, and Mango Films. It capitalizes on the combined tabletop, live action, and postproduction forces available on the ground in Guadalajara, as well as on the favorable exchange rate between U.S. and Mexican currencies.
Proving this strategy right is a recent project The Garage took to its southern partner: Lays Potato Chips working with Buck as the creative agency and directed by Charles Nordeen. The shoot required tricky motion control shots partnered with choreographed rigged elements to capture the appetite appeal of Lays chips while maintaining the humanity of the live-action talent.
“Each spot has a fun reversal shot for which we relied heavily on in-studio testing combined with a pre-viz so we could dial in the motion control,” explained Nordeen, who's an alum of SHOOT's 2014 New Directors Showcase. “It was an exciting challenge to have precise shots that also needed to communicate appetite appeal and satisfaction.”
The technical resources and know how for pulling off complex productions of all sorts already was in place in Guadalajara, said Steve Giralt, tabletop director and founder of The Garage, who has been working with Ool Digital there for several years on projects that required photoreal CG. They brought Mango into the consortium to add its years of experience producing live action across Latin America, explained Giralt, who is a first-generation Cuban American and fluent in Spanish. He called the venture a “dream team.”
After spending time on the ground there in production for Lays, Halie Graham, executive producer at The Garage, agreed. “Knowing we had every possible production solution available to us meant nothing was off the table creatively. And shooting these spots in Mexico really allowed our primary focus to stay on the creative since we were able to maintain budget efficiency.”
And that’s not all. As Nordeen pointed out, “The food scene in Guadalajara is amazing. So for me it was a heavenly location.”
