Vibes are better when they’re organic

15 sec spot: The Fisherman

15 sec spot: The Tailor

15 Sec Spot: Supper

15 sec spot: The Influencer

15 sec spot: The Welder

2017: 30 Sec Announcement Ad

The very first project we did with State Hotel way back in 2016. This came out at the beginning of 2017. Fun fact, did you know Pike Place isn’t even remotely regulated by the City of Seattle? You have to go through a totally different permitting process to officially film there.

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I have been working with The State Hotel since 2016.

This project was formed to create various media units to be advertising and other marketing collateral for the Spring 2020 campaign. I led our creative team through various ideation stages until my creative director settled on a direction we all were enthusiastic about. We pitched, received the budget ($20,000), and got to work.

Since our location was easily secured, it really began working backwards from when certain hotel features would be most available. We needed the big suite on the roof, access to the kitchen and bar, along with the lobby. I delegated one my producers to work with hotel staff to locate the ideal three-day stretch that lined up with our crew availabilities, and book them.

I handed casting to my creative director and handled all the agency agreements and paperwork for them and our crew as we solidified the final details. Props were sourced by myself and the other producer. My creative director and I spent a day onsite photographing for the storyboard and shot list. I offered insight into prioritizing shots, designed a shoot schedule with my assistant director, wrote up the call sheets, held team sync meetings, and ensured a mobile snack/coffee setup was with us throughout shooting.

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Production took three full days. My assistant director had organized the cast to arrive at half-day increments to avoid larger talent fees, which kept us on a very tight schedule. For the most part everything went smoothly and to plan. However, something always goes wrong; in this production, it was the fisherman’s pants. On the first dry-run, the actor/stuntman split the pants from the crotch to the leg – we did not have a second pair of rubber pants. Thinking quickly, I snapped a picture of the color and ran to the nearest store to look for anything to fix it while the crew continued more staging and dry runs. I was able to find a pair of yellow women’s pants that matched the color. We had the actor wear those underneath the rubber overalls, and attempted an interior tape stitch to hold it all together. If you look closely, you can see where the tear folds out during his handstand turn, but only if you look really close.

The welding scenes? They’re actually happening on site. We wanted to have actual welding sparks on an actual metal mug (that we had fabricated) and shoot it practically, without needing to rely on any digital effects. We consulted a local welder to make sure we had a welding kit that could be used without ventilation, and closed the set with pipe and drape to keep anyone outside set from looking at the retina-burning flame. We also only had from load in (7a) to 11a to get this shot before the hotel required complete access to serve their guests. A fun fact here is that I’m in the scene because our actor was so late that we needed someone to sit in for this if we were going to make our day. Apparently, I’m trendy enough and it worked.

One final note on the production – the dog is actually my dog! We wrote a scene where a dog was wearing a puffy coat that matched his owner who was getting fitted for one in his suite. After seeing the options of coats vs. what we had on hand, the creative director made the call to use my dog and his coat. In my ten years of producing, I’d never had my dog on set before. Needless to say, the hotel staff, cast, and crew were pretty delighted to have a cool little schnauzer hanging out with them all day.

post

Post-production was handled similarly to all other projects; establish timeline of footage ingestion and shot matching to script/storyboard, assemble cuts with placeholder graphics and music for rough cut sign off, iterate on music/FX and other design details into fine cut, send for approval/feedback, continue refining until final cut and handoff.

Since we didn’t need any special effects, the real task was determining the copy and animation style. A member of our team had worked with the hotel group managing the State Hotel before, so I assigned her to run communication between the client and our team as we iterated on all the versions of rough to final cut. We found in editing that there were some b-roll shots that were necessary to help bind the super cut and hero reel together. I coordinated with the hotel staff to have a two person skeleton crew show up to capture additional assets in a half-day shoot. Once we had that, it was left to color, score, and render out what you see above.