New Old Spice Commercial

Okay, I am now completely humbled. The day after Old Spice purchased a couple of :30sec spots from the Poptent community, they launched their newest professionally produced commercial: “Different Scents for Different Gents.”

I will never bad mouth ad agencies again. Even though it’s fun and fulfilling to work on all aspects of a commercial yourself, it’s pretty impossible to achieve a product like this without a great team. Imagine if we had scrolling credits at the end of our commercials.

Credits:
Agency: Wieden+Kennedy, Portland
Executive Creative Directors: Mark Fitzloff, Susan Hoffman
Creative Directors: Jason Bagley, Eric Baldwin
Art Director: Craig Allen
Copywriter: Eric Kallman
Agency Executive Producer: Ben Grylewicz
Agency Producer: Andres Murillo
Production Company: MJZ, Los Angeles
Director: Tom Kuntz
Executive Producer: Jeff Scruton
Producer: Scott Kaplan
DP: Salvatore Totino
Editor: Gavin Cutler @ Mackenzie Cutler
VFX: The Mill, Los Angeles
Flame Artist: Phil Crowe
Lead CG: Dan Marum
VFX Producer/Executive Producer: Arielle Davis/Sue Troyan
Color Correction: CO3
Audio Post-Production: Lime Studios
Sound Designer: Gus Coven (Stimmung)/Sam Shaffer (Mackenzie Cutler)

Man, these guys are on fire.  The world sounds much better in Auto-Tune.

It’s a tough life, but someone has to live it. Couldn’t be more jealous of my buddy’s recent excursion down to Bolivia to pull up some of the biggest Dorado you’ve seen come out of a river.

If you’re interested, our friend Joey Lin and his company, Far Out Fishing Trips, can hook you up with a great deal on an incredible trip.

Awesome HD production from the guys at Reel Action Media.  This is their 5 minute trailer for their soon to be released DVD – “Reyes del Rio.”  Why didn’t I get into filmmaking for Anglers instead of the artsy fartsy side of production?

Stahl Urban

Joey Lin and his Massive Dorado

I’ve entered a lot of video contests this year, and the one sure-fire thing I see over and over again is that Rap Videos, no matter how good (I’ve seen some really good ones), almost never win a video contest.  Notice how I use the word never with almost italicized before it.

I’ll start with a BIG example first.  And by big, I mean prize money.  As in $25,000 grand prize money for the winner.  TaxSlayer.com had it’s second commercial video contest earlier this year.  There were a lot of great submissions, including this rap video I really liked.

A lot of effort went in to making this production. Everything from writing a catchy and relevant song, recording it, obtaining all the extra actors to be in the video (never easy) to the post production work with a few effects and great editing. I kind of feel bad for these guys that they didn’t win due to the effort that went in to making it.

Now contrast the production value of this rap video with the actual Winner of the 2009 Taxslayer.com video contest:

The first problem is that you’re competing with HappyJoel at his best. No offense to Joel, but he doesn’t put a whole hell of lot of work into the production value of his videos. And, he doesn’t have to. He’s got a sense of humor that will eat your production value for lunch when you catch him on a good day. So many great lines in this comedy including when he permits “Sarah” to ask her question, and the reporter’s voice barely changes an octave. And, the classic answer to the question, “How many maiden’s have you rescued?”