ABR Spec Commercial
I took a day to plan a potential commercial for a mom and pop company
Being creative is the point, I found myself with a day with no plans, so I decided to bash together a commercial for a local company. I had 10hrs, and no limits!
Perhaps the greatest 80’s trailer there was, a personal favourite as well. I riffed heavily on this asthetic for the commercial. It’s totally a christmas film too.
Made a pot of tea and started writing. The idea here was to create an extremely simple narrative whilst being tangably in the world of HVAC. It’s small mom and pop company but I wanted to give it the high gloss of an 80’s picture. The simplicty was two fold, something that could be crafted in a long days work but also something suitable for a real shoot.
Looking over their website, I just started grabbing images, logos, offer stills etc. I was able to get a feel for the company and the world in which it exists. The style I wanted was grounded but cinematic, the viewer had to instantly know HVAC but also, that it wasn’t a normal local cable commercial.
We start with a computer printing the order, akin to a fire brigade or a kitchen, it’s all about the order and getting it furfiled. It’s the sole purpose of the company. I grew up installing games on DOS, even though it’s old technology it felt appropiate to have the company powered by it, dependable and honest.
Normally you’d set up a screen comp but I wanted to work fast, so I knocked up a quick edit from a DOS screen recording and mapped it to the face of the monitor asset, rendered it out and used it directly in the edit. I did very little work to the shots, basic lights, low res shadows, anything I could do to get the shot out and move on.
Wholesale by it’s nature means you buy in bulk, bulk needs space. I figured why not make the warehouse a liminal space that went on and on, stocked from floor to ceiling with products. There was no time to model, sites like CGTrader are your friend here, assets like these are offered for free or a very small fee, worth it for sure. There was a little tweaking to get it to work.
Warehouses don’t need to be boring, whenever I’m in one, usually IKEA I think of Raiders. A beautiful matte painting by Michael Pangrazio. That’s the commercial, it was filled with references to films that made me, I wasn’t constricted by a client, I could just make. The idea that an ABR employee enters this space and spends a day searching made me smile.
Ford running from the train in The Fugitive is an iconic moment in cinema, one of the truly great stunts but also the bright yellow prison boiler suit was something I wanted to crowbar into the commercial. I opted to nudge the colours more towards an orange but the feel was there, I kept the white garments and trainers. Inspiration is just that, it doesn’t need to be copied, just felt in the work.
Films just have moments to remember, these moments live rent free in my head, they can be moments people talk about or they can be small. The idea of the worker switching the light on came from The Rock, when the SEALS are found in the shower room, the hum of the incandacent bulb as it warms up. The reveal of the work at the warehouse door was greatly influenced by Indiana Jones coming back to save the children in Temple of Doom and the general feeling of the warehouse came from the oilman in Waterworld.
I decided to finish on a map, I original intended for this to be a computer screen read out but time was against me. The beauty of previs is that it’s both a finished article and a super rough roadmap for further work.