Commercial Example: Graveyard Shift

The Client: TV Channel 2 in Los Angeles needed to retain viewers during their "Graveyard Shift" program of late-night horror movies. Viewers were changing channels or going to bed at commercial breaks. They turned to The Association for a short, but high-quality commercial video production.

The Goal: Increase the number of late-night Graveyard Shift viewers.

The Solution: Create a short commercial to run at the beginning of commercial breaks and that maintains continuing interest in watching Graveyard Shift.

The Approach: Use a skeleton character and the "Graveyard Shift" and "Horror" themes.

The Bright Ideas:
Use "Graveyard Shift" literally, having skeleton hand punch a time card into a factory time clock, with the Channel 2 logo on the card. The factory steam whistle shot has sound effects of a woman's scream. Skeleton sits and relaxes in front of television with popcorn and soft drink. Skeleton grins happily.

Skeleton tosses popcorn into mouth and popcorn bounces down through empty chest cavity. Skeleton takes drink from soft drink cup, burps happily.

The Production: The simplest method was a marionette skeleton doing the action and grinning happily, backed up by special lighting, fog and sound effects.

The Result: A 30-second promotion spot to run at the beginning of the commercial break. Viewers raved about this new character, and viewer retention improved.

The Reward: An Emmy Award for "Graveyard Shift!"

Commercial Example: Kawasaki Motors Corp.

The Association packed up a 4-man camera crew and gear for an on location filming way back in the mountains above San Bernardino, California. Kawasaki Motors Corporation was rolling out a new product line of All Terrain Vehicles, those 4-wheeler dirt machines that can go just about anywhere. And naturally, the goal was to showcase these off-roaders splashing through mountain streams, bouncing up rocky trails, and sailing airborne through blue sky. The crew only had three days to cram in dozens of shootings at many different locations and points of view. Fortunately, they had the very finest four-wheel all-terrain transportation to haul themselves and their gear from site to site.

A problem peculiar to this location and this type of filming is dust. The Kawasakis each kick up a plume of desert mountain dust, and the group riding scenes had to be precisely choreographed and shot to avoid machines hiding each other in their dust clouds. With no wind, the dust just hangs in place, and variable winds could put the clouds in the wrong places. Furthermore, each ride must never show any old tracks from previous attempts. No mistakes were allowed; the shooting schedule was too tight to wait for the dust to settle or to move to a track-free location for another take. Naturally, the weather cooperated and the filming went smoothly. Of course.

Our camera crew purposely spent many hours around the evening campfires swapping stories with the Kawasaki drivers and building the vital camaraderie, trust and mutual respect needed to run a tightly coordinated operation. Together, the professional team pulled off the whole operation with exacting precision.