Adland_ Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet - James P. Othmer [41]
It didn’t matter. This wasn’t L.A., and he did not want to be here. I was surprised, not about the L.A. part, but because this was supposed to be the easiest of the three commercials, a fairly straightforward, quick-turnaround promo spot that we had to get on the air to keep the franchisees at bay until our silly-song campaign was ready to save the day. Simple. No on-camera dialogue, just a bunch of young people at a party getting orgasmic about fried chicken strips and mayo-like goop wrapped in a tortilla. We’d add the food cutaways from the tabletop shoot and score it to the campaign theme song the agency had created, and that would be that. Or not.
After watching another bite-and-chew take that culminated in another contribution to the spit bucket (a sequence we found so hilarious we would make a separate video, scored to the same theme song but for agency eyes only, of pretty people spitting half-chewed chicken into a bucket), the client stormed across the set to accost the director. I turned to the account executive. “How about a cocktail?” I asked. “Is it too early to have crafts service mix him a drink?”
She shook her head. “He’s an alcoholic. Recovering. You don’t want to go there.”
I nodded. Fair enough. “How about a masseuse? Or a hooker?” I asked jokingly. I think. “Or is he a recovering sex addict, too?”
I had never been to a tabletop shoot before. Every spot I’d ever made up to that point had been with a live-action director, or animation, and if a product shot was necessary, the director would simply take extra care to light and shoot it as well as possible. But food is different. QSR is different. And the way the food looks is everything in an ad for a QSR. Even if Scorsese were to shoot the live action, he’d have to defer to a tabletop person on a QSR shoot. Because a good tabletop director can make even the most over-processed, chemical-laden food appear on your TV screen looking like something you may even want to eat.
So I was semi-excited, or at least mildly curious, as I walked upstairs and into the Chelsea loft to join the tabletop shoot already in progress. And I use the term “progress” very loosely. When I’d originally looked at the food section of the director’s show reel (one of approximately fifty that we’d screened and debated), I was transfixed by a montage of glistening shrimp dancing on barbecue grills, monster burgers flipping over open flames, succulent fruit falling from the sky in erotically choreographed formations. On his show reel, movement was everything, and it seemed to occur with a freewheeling grace and spontaneity, tossing, spinning, whirling, tumbling, sizzling, dripping, and plumping, at once mouthwateringly tempting and strangely beautiful. So, naturally, I expected to walk in on a carnival of flying food, bass-thumping house music, and a flurry of activity.
Instead, I found the silence of a hospital surgery room and three account people, an agency art director, and a junior client staring blankly at a tiny video monitor that had no picture. On a food shoot, I would soon discover, there was no freewheeling spontaneity; everything was meticulously coordinated and painstakingly considered. On a food shoot nothing moved. Least of all the camera. I took a seat next to the zombies and opened a beer. At least the senior client was gone for the night, back at his Manhattan boutique hotel, prepping for a gourmet meal with the heads of my agency.
At 7:00 p.m., after two hours of prep, we were invited to look into the camera to check the lighting and composition of a shot of a wooden honey dripper seductively rolling a bead of golden honey along the ridge of a fried chicken strip. At 8:00 p.m., they finally rolled film, securing the honey-drip shot. At 10:00 p.m., after eating my sixth (chicken-free) crafts-service meal of the day, I was asked to sign off on the composition and choreography of the dancing-chili-pepper shot. At 11:00 p.m., just as we were capturing that small piece of cinema