Lunesta Commercial

NSFW-ish.

Just a warning for others in an office environment who dont feel like explaining what they are watching/ not supposed to be watching videos in the first place.
 
Love the look of the lighting (and the girls) but just felt it was a little too dark overall.
 
Loved the look overall. Concept was sublte and smart. I think that is a relatively hard task to pull off. Did you conceptualize this? Will this run nationally? How'd you get rights to this song?

I think it's a terrific ad. Sales were probably down in the mens dept. of lunesta. At least that's what it seems since this lunesta ad seems to be specificaly geared towards men.
 
I like the concept but the dream idea isn't readily apparent until the end. Not a bad thing, but maybe using a guy that looks like he would NEVER be with women like that would carry off the dream idea in a more up-front way.

Visually very well done!
 
Thanks for all the nice comments.

Kevin, I wanted it to be a reveal at the end, so I guess I'm happy it isn't readily apparent to you until the end. In casting I saw a big variety of ages and appearances. I ended up going with the guy you see, Brian Ish, because he had the right balance - he was a little bit older looking than the girls, but not to the point where it was creepy, he wasn't a complete stud to the point that this seemed like an every day event, but he wasn't completly ugly to the point where this situation could never take place. Overall, I'm happy with the level of subtlety.

I'll post later with more technical information about the on set workflow, the lighting approach, and post. Anything anyone wants to hear about particularly?
 
i love raw stock lense hvx, but this commercial would have looked a lot better with an adapter. my 2 cents
 
I agree. I think it looks great as is, but I think having shallower DOF for some of the shots would have been appropriate. I bought the Brevis for the shoot. We were planning on using it. When doing tests, however, I found that the switch was broken and we could not use it. The adapter is on its way back to Dennis at Cinevate.
 
I thought I would take some time to talk about the P2 workflow...

On Set Workflow
We had two HVX’s on set: one as the main production camera and another as a backup camera, which ended up functioning as our P2 card reader. We were shooting in my apartment, so I made sure to leave space for my G5 to remain setup. I had my editor, Dan, on set. I had him there mainly to oversee the downloading and formatting of the P2 cards, as well as the organization and archiving of the footage after it had been loaded off the P2. We had three 8gb P2 cards. One was in the camera, one was being loaded, and one was waiting - formatted and ready to go. With the 3 cards, it ended up being such a smooth workflow that we were able to switch P2 cards every single shot. After I called the shot and we decided to move on, I would tell Dan which take I liked, and right after the card downloaded, he’d bring the footage into Final Cut Pro 5, set the ins and outs, and place it on the timeline. I kid you not, 5 minutes after we wrapped, Dan had a full first cut (with preliminary color correction) to show the entire cast and crew. It was absolutely amazing for everyone to see their hard work paying off almost instantaneously.

We shot three spots in one weekend, this Lunesta spot being the last, but I can say with absolute certainty that the crew worked extra hard after seeing cuts, knowing that their help was worth the effort.

Having my editor on set was also a big asset when it comes to coverage. As a director, I’m aware that I never get quite enough coverage. Having Dan cutting on set really helped, because he would interject and say, these two shots on the storyboard really aren’t cutting together, I need an insert of a hand or of eyes or something. Without the HVX, I would have had to do a quick reshoot for these inserts.

Another great thing about the workflow was that I, as well as my DP, were able to preview the look. We were going for a very particular high contrast, edgy, fashion feel that was fairly dark. I wanted to shoot plain so that 1. I could retain shadow detail if I wanted to bring it out later and 2. Minimize low light noise issues. We set up our first shot, rolled off a few seconds, loaded it in to FCP and took 5 minutes to play with color correction and magic bullet looks. Now that we knew the way we were lighting it combined with the camera settings and the look in post was going to work, we were free to start the shoot with the utmost confidence.

*I will post later with storyboard/screengrab comparisons, behind the scenes photos and lighting info, and finally post-production process with before/after stills.
 
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