Heinz Commercial contest entry "Dinner at Eight"

Bayne

Bayne

Well-known member
So we've entered a 30 second spot in the Heinz commercial contest (http://www.topthistv.com). The top fifteen will be selected by a panel of judges and posted on a website on or about August 27th, and then web surfers will vote to pick the top five. Winner takes home $57K and the four runners up receive $5K each.

Check out our entry and drop us a comment if you care to (helps build the visibility for us!) and forward the link to anyone you think would get a kick out of it. Bear in mind that YouTube compresses the crap out of the videos, so once the contest is over, I'll be able to post a hi-res version on my site. Hence, I would recommend "shrinking" the video to it's best viewing size (that's the button to the left of the "Full Screen" button on the control bar).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9u9JcTTp8lo

CREDITS
written, directed, and edited by Ignatius Fischer
DP/camera operator/visual effects by Derek Nickell
production design by Elissa Finerman
starring Richard Finerman
lighting provided by Deeble Video Productions
food prep by Sohail Wasif
"18761__acclivity__TwoToneDoorbell" courtesy of Acclivity of the Freesound Project (http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/)
produced by Ignatius Fischer
executive produced by Michelle Fischer, Katerina Fischer, Louisa Fischer

IF
 
The Heinz contest isn't over. You can still enter. Try googin' it, can't remember the site right now.
 
the contest ends on the 6th.

You've got a good looking spot there bayne. It's different from anything else i've seen in the contest.
 
Fantastic Job.
How did you get that depth of field effect?
Which camera/lenses did you use?
I'm impressed. You definately have a chance.
 
Hmm. Clearly a lot of work went into this, and I can appreciate just what it took to pull this off. Having said that, I was disappointed. Disappointed in a specific context - the quality of work and the amount of thought that went into this raised my expectations quite high - it is those high expectations which were disappointed (next time lowball expectations, so if you exceed them, you'll get tons of praise<ggg>).

My problem is the close camera work combined with the editing style. Yes, you tried to get good DOF, but in conjuction with the editing style, it failed. This is the paradox - the camera work was good. The editing style fit what you wanted to achieve. Problem was in combining those two things which are fine on their own.

At the beginning, you establish a visual cue and tempo - great. We see the cutting board and so on. So far so good. Now the problem - that huge honking distracting, blurry sleeve!!! It slams into view totally throwing me out of the experience the visual cue led me to - I was expecting sharp, close, detailed, smoothly cruising work. That sleeve was extremely jarring. Then the table-cloth/napkin thing - this could have been done better - I know you were going for the elegant swirl thing, but it just wasn't elegant enough, instead it came off too much of a random blur. The worst however was the disorienting transition just before we see the wine rack - what the HELL is that yellow rod thing moving across the screen left to right???

In a sequence like this, where no image stays for long, it is critical to pick the images and cutting tempo in order to sustain the mood until the punch line. The problem here is that I'm thrown out of the experience too often before the punch line, and so I get hung up (like wondering about the rod thing "hey, what the heck was that?!?") along the way and never get to feel the strength of the delivery. I'd recommend re-thinking which images you are going to pick, and I'd play a bit more with the timing of cuts (this is a matter of miliseconds).

As to the actual content - meh. The pay off image is not that great. It' s not awful, or bad, just not particularly good. Now, I suspect there's a way to pull off something good here with this IF you can come up with a good line. "Let it breathe" - is not good enough by far. Come up with a killer line, and this thing might fly.
 
While I'm not as critical as the previous post, I agree that the punch line could be a bit better. "Let it breathe" just doesn't give the images justice. The quality is great, but it seems to just end instead of build to a climax. I LOVED the winking "ding," though. Also, I'm producing an entry as well. Did you make your own music, because I thought you had to have done everything on your own. Or was that some of the music that Heinz offered on their site?

Overall - A.
100 times better than all the other entries I've seen so far, which has been quite a few.
Good work.
 
Thank you all for your comments.

berlinfool said:
Fantastic Job.
How did you get that depth of field effect?
Which camera/lenses did you use?
I'm impressed. You definately have a chance.
Click to expand...

This was shot with a DVX100b and a RR M2 adapter, varying focal lengths from 50mm to a 200mm F2.8 were used. Sound was catured using an AT4073, edited with FCP. Visual effects were done with AE7.

John Scott 3 said:
While I'm not as critical as the previous post, I agree that the punch line could be a bit better. "Let it breathe" just doesn't give the images justice. The quality is great, but it seems to just end instead of build to a climax. I LOVED the winking "ding," though. Also, I'm producing an entry as well. Did you make your own music, because I thought you had to have done everything on your own. Or was that some of the music that Heinz offered on their site?

Overall - A.
100 times better than all the other entries I've seen so far, which has been quite a few.
Good work.
Click to expand...

There was stock music that Heinz provided, along with chroma key logos and varying other odds and ends.
 
OldCorpse said:
Hmm. Clearly a lot of work went into this, and I can appreciate just what it took to pull this off. Having said that, I was disappointed. Disappointed in a specific context - the quality of work and the amount of thought that went into this raised my expectations quite high - it is those high expectations which were disappointed (next time lowball expectations, so if you exceed them, you'll get tons of praise<ggg>).

My problem is the close camera work combined with the editing style. Yes, you tried to get good DOF, but in conjuction with the editing style, it failed. This is the paradox - the camera work was good. The editing style fit what you wanted to achieve. Problem was in combining those two things which are fine on their own.

At the beginning, you establish a visual cue and tempo - great. We see the cutting board and so on. So far so good. Now the problem - that huge honking distracting, blurry sleeve!!! It slams into view totally throwing me out of the experience the visual cue led me to - I was expecting sharp, close, detailed, smoothly cruising work. That sleeve was extremely jarring. Then the table-cloth/napkin thing - this could have been done better - I know you were going for the elegant swirl thing, but it just wasn't elegant enough, instead it came off too much of a random blur. The worst however was the disorienting transition just before we see the wine rack - what the HELL is that yellow rod thing moving across the screen left to right???

In a sequence like this, where no image stays for long, it is critical to pick the images and cutting tempo in order to sustain the mood until the punch line. The problem here is that I'm thrown out of the experience too often before the punch line, and so I get hung up (like wondering about the rod thing "hey, what the heck was that?!?") along the way and never get to feel the strength of the delivery. I'd recommend re-thinking which images you are going to pick, and I'd play a bit more with the timing of cuts (this is a matter of miliseconds).

As to the actual content - meh. The pay off image is not that great. It' s not awful, or bad, just not particularly good. Now, I suspect there's a way to pull off something good here with this IF you can come up with a good line. "Let it breathe" - is not good enough by far. Come up with a killer line, and this thing might fly.
Click to expand...

Ok....now that i have read your post in its entirety, I shall comment or at least defend the maker.

1st thing....THIS IS ON YOUTUBE!!! the big honking yellow thing is the door of the wine case opening...also...take into account that the picture quality here is what, a measly 300kbps? Please remember that words like "Sharp, detailed and smooth, are not part of YouTube's vocabulary. So random blurs are a common appearance...So thank you for your criticism, but we are not at Cannes...

-fin-
 
Lol! Good job, think it was a well done commercial... even with YouTube trying it's hardest to make it look bad.
 
I also have one more question for you. I noticed that you are shooting with an HD camera and editing in FCP. I have been experiencing a lot of horrible issues with exporting footage to quicktime while trying to maintain the 16:9. Could you tell me what settings or what configuration you use in order to export your footage? Thanks a lot. Here is a link to the actual thread with my problem: http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?t=105509. And sorry for asking on here.

The film does look great, and I'm sure it's worth of the $5,700 or even the $57,000. Either way, you're doing Heinz proud.
 
John Scott 3 said:
I also have one more question for you. I noticed that you are shooting with an HD camera and editing in FCP. I have been experiencing a lot of horrible issues with exporting footage to quicktime while trying to maintain the 16:9. Could you tell me what settings or what configuration you use in order to export your footage? Thanks a lot. Here is a link to the actual thread with my problem: http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?t=105509. And sorry for asking on here.

The film does look great, and I'm sure it's worth of the $5,700 or even the $57,000. Either way, you're doing Heinz proud.
Click to expand...

Thanks John, we actually didnt shoot on a HD rig, it was a DVX100B, not the HVX. The person who edited it is on this board, he would know, his username is ignatius. He would know exactly what setting she used to export.
 
Bayne said:
Thanks John, we actually didnt shoot on a HD rig, it was a DVX100B, not the HVX. The person who edited it is on this board, he would know, his username is ignatius. He would know exactly what setting she used to export.
Click to expand...

Thanks so much, Bayne. And again, awesome job and good luck. :)
 
Nice looking spot, certainly among the top that I've seen on there. I just did the math. They've already got over 2,300 entries, and I wouldn't be surprised if they hit 3,000 by Monday night (cut off). So people will have to beat out over 99.5% of the competition to make the top 15!
 
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