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Doritos 2012 Superbowl Ad - Dir. Joe Adams

Note: I’m unable to embed the video from the actual competition site due to technical restrictions of the Tumblr platform that this blog runs on, so the above link is to Vimeo. For your view to count towards the competition (I think more is better?), please watch it here.

Here is the BuzzStudios entry for the annual Doritos “Crash the Superbowl” competition, and the second time I have participated in it. This 30-second commercial we created under director Joe Adams, if chosen as one of a few winners, will be aired during the Superbowl in a few months. If it does well after that, our team could be given the chance to collaborate with The Lonely Island, which would be pretty freakin sweet. Plus cash prizes, which would be cool too.

Director of Photography Ildar Musin shot this on a Canon T2i using only a Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8 lens. For stabilization, Ildar had a pretty tricked-out ProAim shoulder rig, as you can see from the photos.

Shooting went pretty quickly, with only a few shots requiring much setup. And as we had less than 48 hours between the shoot and deadline for the contest, Joe and Ildar had to turn this around pretty quickly. They pulled it off, and not even a week later it’s been viewed almost 1000 times!

When showing this to people, I constantly get questions about how we did these two shots:

To pull off this shot of a dog pointlessly chasing a car, we had to find a canine that knew how to chase a car (easy), but also knew not to run off and start a 30-minute long chase between takes (not so easy). I was once given the advice of “if you want a shoot to run smoothly, never work with kids or animals,” which I understood all too well from trying to convince my cat to simply walk through one damn door in “Confessions of Vengeance”. So, I arrived on set that morning expecting the worst.

In the end, things went better than expected. Through Craigslist, Joe found a professional dog trainer willing to volunteer one of her dogs for the position. To get him to chase the car, she hung a rubber ball from a rope attached to the rear bumper. It was just short enough to keep the ball out of sight of the camera, but just long enough to let it bounce around and drive the dog crazy with anticipation. Once the car started rumbling down the road and the trainer released his collar, all the dog could think of was giving chase. I wish all the actors I’ve worked with over the years had been that devoted to their parts.

The second shot I’ve been asked to explain half a dozen times is where Joe (the director) volunteered to be the one dragged behind the truck to close out the commercial. To make this happen, we put the camera and mic into the back compartment of the truck, pointed it down, laid him on top of a long skateboard (or “longboard”, as some say), cropped in tight to hide the PA holding his legs to make sure he didn’t fall off, and drove at about 3 or 4 miles per hour. The tightness of the shot gives the appearance that the truck is moving faster than it actually is.

Joe seemed enthusiastic before the first take, but his screams were much louder and more terrifying than any of us had been prepared for (as the truck started rolling, he suddenly crossed “stunt man” off his list of career choices and held on for dear life), causing distortion in the audio. He was not happy when we told him he had to adjust our levels and do a second take, but suffered through it and gave us one of the funniest shots I’ve ever been behind.

If we make the semifinals I’ll be posting about this ad again asking for your votes. Fingers crossed.