This summer, our friends from 3 Headed Monster approached our production company with some killer creative for their latest campaign for ride-sharer Avail by Allstate. The relative newcomer to the market was looking to showcase the ease of their rental process in a dynamic and engaging way. The campaign, which featured multiple riders enjoying a variety of experiences in the same rental vehicle, presented a wide variety of complex challenges for both our Productions and Editorial studios. Teaming up on projects like these are what we do best.
Because vignettes in the spots needed to take place during different times of year, the immediate question for our production team was how to get this all done in just two allotted shoot days? Shooting on an XR stage was considered as an option, however director Chad Ostrom felt a real environment would be more true to the creative concept. That led to the next immediate question – where should we shoot? We landed on Portland, Oregon, with its year round snow on Mt. Hood, a diverse topography, and reputation of being the home to a strong production scene.
The shoot was certainly an ambitious one for the Republic production company to tackle – a large cast, multiple locations per day, different times of day for filming, and of course a good handful of traffic control restrictions. Many times, it’s very obvious how to put the puzzle together – this one had so many variables that it seemed more like a house of cards.
Day 1 itself had a whole slew of locations – a big box retail parking lot, an airport, city streets downtown, an office parking lot and an amusement park. Thankfully the locations were relatively close to each other, but the sheer volume of company moves was daunting. With the base of a clear agency concept, sound shooting boards, and clean execution while bobbing through the inevitable production challenges that always pop up, Ostrom and the agency stayed in lockstep throughout the entire day. By the end of the evening, we got everything needed and focused our energy towards doing the same for Day 2.
Gratefully we had less company moves on our second shoot day, although we did have farther distances to cover as our end location was at Timberline Lodge next to Mt. Hood. The biggest speed bump of the day came when our rented process trailer stalled going up a steep hill, a situation which both delayed our schedule and forced the team to pivot on one of the shots. After some quick thinking and creative shot making, we then moved on to Timberline Lodge (the famous shooting location for ‘The Shining’) where we captured the snowy winter vignette before calling a wrap on our 2 day saga.
The post schedule for the first :30 (of the two :30’s plus social package) perfectly mirrored the mad schedule of the production. Hours after wrapping our shoot, Ostrom downloaded our post team, headed by editor Keith James, with his specific notes from the shoot. The two had previously gameplanned framing and tempo prior to the shoot, so after getting a little input on performance, James was ready to start cutting.
Although the spot opens were tightly scripted, the meat of the stories were widely open for interpretation and relied heavily on craftily weaving in on-camera dialogue and performances around the rather lengthy voice over. Keeping a linear thread with scripted and improvised lines was challenging, but with some innovative cutting and strong collaboration from the agency, everything came together rather quickly. It actually came together so surprisingly smoothly that the client decided to move up the ship date for the second spot.
As great as it was to have things rolling ahead of schedule, the accelerated timeline did somewhat upset the apple cart for the structure of the second spot. Because this campaign would now air entirely in summer, the snowy vignettes had to be shelved for a later winter campaign. On the bright side, going back a little to the drawing board gave the team an opportunity to pick up all the great pieces that were unfortunately left on the cutting floor during the build of the first spot.
Once the structure of the spots were nailed down, Flame artist Bryan Bayley began coloring and finishing-out of the campaign. Maintaining time-of-day continuity drove a lot of the looks due to the vignette structure (a bright daytime landscape drive-away shot was spun heavily to magic hour to match the preceding scene). And although a few of the backgrounds were enhanced with a little compositing (an amusement park ride was added into one of the scenes), the majority of Bayley’s work involved good ol’ car, windshield and environment cleanup.
The final challenge was to make the awesomeness of the audio sound match the awesomeness of the picture. The job of balancing and augmenting all the complex audio elements was handled by our lead audio engineer, Greg Carlson. Rough sound design was enhanced and massaged, and the music and dialogue was adjusted to accommodate last minute changes to the script.
In the end, as always, all the beautiful yet complex puzzle pieces created by our production team were placed into their exact right spots by our post team. This finished campaign for Avail was one of our most favorite campaigns of the summer. When you check it out, we hope you have as much fun watching the work as we did creating it.
“For Avail we had a good concept but we didn’t have a lot of time. Being able to package the production and post at Republic was a huge advantage and the artists they were able to bring to the table really elevated the entire project.”
Matt Faris / Head of Production 3 Headed Monster