Getting ready with Carter Bloodcare
Our latest commercial work with Carter BloodCare is now out in the world and we wanted to take a little dive into how we made it happen and some of the unique challenges that we faced.
Concept
This was our second year and commercial project with Carter BloodCare. Last year we produced one of our favorite spots, Gamer. When it came to this year’s, Carter wanted to take the concept a step further and aim for an even bigger concept. For the project, we again partnered with Swash Labs, Carter’s advertising agency and brainstormed a few concepts to pitch to the Carter team. We had some solid ideas, but the goal was to engage with an audience of late Gen Z-ers and Millennials, both men & women. This led us to the concept of leaning more into social media as a backdrop and the trend of “Get Ready with Me” videos.
The idea wanted to portray a standard GRWM video, but the reveal would be that the star is meeting up with her friends to donate blood. A little twist on a the normal outcome of going to a party, club, or big concert. We also wanted this direction because Gen-Z and Millenials have a habit of doing things with their friends that may not have been normal outings for previous generations. Going to donate blood could be a real hang out between friends in this day and age.
Preproduction
While we collaborated on the concept and pitch, Swash Labs handled the initial rough story board and scripting process, due to having a strong grasp on Carter BloodCare’s values, brand, and what they’d want to see. Once the script was nailed down, we moved forward on the casting, crew booking, and location scouting. With a few preview photos of the McKinney Carter location, we knew that was the location we wanted the actual donating to take place.
This meant our second location would also need to be in the McKinney area, to not eat up a ton of time during a company move (complete change of location). Luckily, we found this cute little home on AirBnB and we found the owner of the listing. This location matched the vibe of the project we were going for and would accomplish most of the heavy lifting in design for us!
Previsualized storyboard vs the final frame
3d Location Scans
One great tool we were able to make use of was Lidar scans of the locations we were going to film in. Iphone Pro models have built in Lidar tech, that uses telemetry data in order to create scans of objects or even locations at a very precise level. This meant we could 3d scan our locations and create 3d story boards choosing the exact angles we wanted ahead of time, rather than on the day. We could use this information to coordinate with our production design team and other crew to have know exactly where lights, knick knacks, or actions would take place. Taking out all of the guesswork on the day.
Based on our preditermined frames, we knew exactly where to place the camera, what items and who needed to be in frame, and how to light it all before stepping foot into the space on the production day.
Production Day
No matter how much you’ve planned, scheduled, and thought out, production days are always hectic and a race against the clock. Though we end the spot at the Carter location, its where we started the day. This location would be relatively quick due to most of the complicated shots taking place in the home.
Our gaffer for the day, Piotr Mokry did a great little vlog about how we accomplished the lighting and look on the day. Check it out here:
The home location was quite small, but just big enough to fit the production. It also fit our concept so well, another option would have taken more time to setup and get picture ready. With such a packed day, every minute counts.
One major concept that was a unique task to tackle on the day, was getting realistic shots from the POV of the phone, to use in the “social media” portions. If the phone screen was ever present on camera, we set the screen to be green. This meant we could key out the screen in editing and replace it with whatever we’d like. If the phone screen was facing away from camera, we used this opportunity to actually record our actors in selfie mode, recording on two cameras at once.
Post Production
Like many of our projects, we had a fairly fast turn around time of 2 weeks for this ad spot. While this is very fast by most standards, the work we did in preproduction made editing a breeze. We already knew what shots we wanted to include and the pacing it should have. It was almost like we just had to replace the place holders with the real footage and call it a day. We actually had a little extra scene that was shot but not used as it had us running a few seconds over our 30 sec limit and the original rough cut of the project ran :38.
The most complicated and difficult part was preparing our phone footage to look like it was in a TikTok like app and getting it all tracked in through After Effects. All in all, we actually had 6 comp shots in the 30 second spot.
All-in-all we are very happy with how the project turned out and so was Carter BloodCare. We’re excited to see how they get a real uptick in donations from their target demographic and look forward to working with them again soon!
