Help with shooting a video commercial for a night club

[Dennis Size]

Tip #1:
Don’t worry about HD — or “good quality” — just for YOU TUBE or FACEBOOK.

[Mark Suszko]

I’m going to disagree there, Dennis; only because nowadays it is easy enough to put up higher quality youtube videos as well as vimeo and such, that can look fantastic if the source material was of good quality. Depending on how good a job you do compressing it, originating in HD will give a better staring point as well as offer some more editing flexibility, and yes, while youtube compression will take some of the quality away, if you start with more, you end up with more.

This is a lighting, not marketing forum, but some things need to be said here to the original poster, Markus.

My advice is to first work much more on developing the ideas before shooting begins. You need to get a really clear idea of the client’s needs beyond some nebulous desire to have a video on the net. What is he trying to sell most, and what is he wanting to SAY? And what kind of visual style and aesthetic have you agreed on to convey this message? If I asked you five specific questions about the club, you should be able to answer at least three after you watch this thing. What are the five things? Or can you cut it to three or less? The best would be if it would really be one thing, either a fact or a feeling.

The fact might be something like; “Not just for the skiers!” The feeling might be: “that place is really jumping on the weekends!” Now you have some idea of what you need to show with either of those decisions. If this is part of a longer term identity campaign, what I might try is to concentrate on two couples, or several singles, and make the thing like a series of micro soap opera episodes, to tell a bigger story over time and follow a plot arc with these characters, while the sales points fly by in the background the whole time. You need something to bring them back and watch more than once, you need to reward attention. One thing might be to make all the spots a back and forth of cell phone videos (though you shoot them in higher quality and make them look like cell videos later in post). The benefit of that is it keeps the shots tight and there’s not as much to light, but if you need to show lots of the club spaces, you’re making a trade-off of wide shots for “story”. See, all this kind of stuff you need to hash out before you get to technical shooting details.

When you have the creative treatment, that is , the creative approach we just talked about, then you can start to figure out how to shoot it.

I will suggest that shooting on a regular club night is not all you will need to do for this. You will also need to schedule some private time in the space with some people you can direct and run gear and extra lights around, to be able to fully control some of the scenes and make them look their best, as they would to a human eye, and not a cell phone cam. Before or after closing time. You will then be able to adjust the lighting to get across a better effect than the real situation, shot live. I see college town video ads for clubs where all you can see is a single indistinct blob of people jumping up and down in the dark, with a blown-out shot of a DJ in the background, *maybe*.. You can do better than that. If you can control the space. This is also where you will get useable audio.

But I can’t tell you what or how to light the spot yet, because you don’t have a spot yet, you don’t have an outline, a story, a list of needed shots, etc.

When you have that, these experts here will give you VERY good advice indeed, they are masters at what they do.

[Richard Herd]

[Mark Suszko] “My advice is to first work much more on developing the ideas before shooting begins.”

Mark is totally correct, as per usual.

I did a fair number of these a while ago, and let me tell you: it is really easy to make a really really really bad video because first and foremost the subjects are not actors. And number two there is no clear call to action. Let put on my advertiser’s hat for a second. You can easily tell a small simple “boy meets girl” story.

Forget location audio.

Having said that, lighting the scene is the easy part. For these I like to use (and I’ve said a million times) Chinese Lanterns and 500w photofloods, because as people are dancing you can hang the flood above them in the middle of a group and get an exact perfect sphere of light emanating in all directions. You can even put one below them, or just off frame. Because they are relatively inexpensive, you can get a lot of them for a very low price. Because they’re light — that is “not heavy to carry” — you can hang them from a boom pole and follow your subject in clever ways.

Also I believe having a few practical bulbs in the shot helps sell the illusion.

[Marcus Perfjell]

I think your tip about the Lantern is a very good advice! The soft light that you get out of that lamp is probably perfect!

Do you think I should use a red (original) one, or a white? red gives a warmer picture, and can probably enhance the feeling of the nightclub.

I don’t know what a 500W photo flood is, could you please post a link? I searched google, but got alot of different matches.

thanks for your answer!

Marcus

The fall of building 7 is a bit weird.

[Marcus Perfjell]

Thank you sooo much for your answer Mark! I highly appreciate it!

I will talk to my friend about the questions you mentioned, just so you know, he basically asked me: “Can you do a commercial?”. and I said, “I’ll look in to it”.
We haven’t spoken since then, I will however contact him tomorrow and thanks to you, I have alot more to work with!

I liked your story tip, very much! I’ll talk to him tomorrow and we will try to agree over something, I think however that the soap opera idea is too “serious”, I think he needs something around 30 seconds, maybe 40, but those 40 seconds needs to be good.

I think what he wants is not continuity, no scenes, even though I would enjoy shooting it, I think he wants it to be more simple. Ofcourse I’m shooting bartenders when they poor drinks from different angles in continuity but not more than that.

I will go there on a regular night, test shoot and see how it looks, then go there when they have events, like playboy and try to get the real shots done.

The story I mentioned about having three or four different “couples”, I was thinking maybe shooting them for about 5 seconds, and then showing their faces at the nightclub later in the movie, what do you think of that for a simple idea? Maybe you could help me with tips on that?

Don’t know if I answered all your questions, but I have very little time since I’m at a internet cafe and they kinda close now, but thank you so much for your post! I will try to post tomorrow after talking to my friend!

Best
Marcus

The fall of building 7 is a bit weird.

[Mark Suszko]

“I think what he wants is not continuity, no scenes, even though I would enjoy shooting it, I think he wants it to be more simple”

Then he really has no idea yet what he wants. It reminds me of when I was 12 or so years old and set up a super-8 stop-motion home movie in my basement, with plastic army men and tanks and stuff, hand-animated into battle scenes. I quickly got very bored with the results; though they were very much prototypical Michael Bay type work, because there was no STORY. Just effects and movement.

Shooting the bartenders tossing bottles around is fun, but that’s not a commercial. Not by itself. Shooting random couples in five second slivers is not by itself a commercial either. You need some kind of narrrative thread to tie these things together.

[Richard Herd]

Here’s a link to the bulb: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/19621-REG/General_Brand__ECT_Lamp_500W_120V.html Keeping this clean is very important, ’cause if it explodes from over-heated grime on the bulb, they are quite nasty.

The fixture I use is a standard worklight from Home Depot. They’re hard to find, actually, because they’re in the wrong department! Not lighting department but tools and hardware. These gadgets have an aluminum reflector I cut off and recycle; it also has an attachable clamp I don’t use but probably could be useful.

I use white and gel as necessary. In my opinion, it’s wise to keep people’s faces natural (unless there’s a surreal story line). The audio will sell the nightclub feeling more than the bizarre light. Sure, you can get that in the trippy lighting in the background or have the subjects sit where the light will sweep passed them from time to time.

[Todd Terry]

All good advice… and as a commercial producer I always tell clients, don’t complicate the story. Keep it simple. The fewer messages you have in there, the better. Every additional message you get waters down all the others. Less is more.

We’ll get potential commercial clients in here that will say they want to make sure this is in there, and don’t forget that, and remember that we’ve been around for 20 years, and we’re home owned and operated, and make sure our address is in there, and our hours and website of course, and don’t forget the phone number… and it goes on and on and on.

An example… the biggest challenge we have with clients is over phone numbers. When’s the last time you got a phone number from a television commercial? Unless you are a mattress company that sings the number in a jingle over and over, or have a 90-second commercial with a phone number graphic up throughout, no one gets phone numbers from TV. It basically just says, “Hey, we’ve got a phone.” Most of the time that is information that is not needed.

Keep it simple.

Television commercials aren’t supposed to do everything. People will have a full-page Yellow Pages ad that is already crammed too full and still think they need all that info in a :30 television spot. ALL a television commercial should do is get someone to walk in the door, pick up a phone, or just have a germ of interest planted in their heads. Clients should rely on all the other types of collateral (newspaper, magazines, outdoor, brochures, phonebook ads, websites) and face-to-face salesmanship to fill in all that other info. The TV commercial should just get you the face to sell to.

I always remind people of the “Bigger! Bigger!” campaign of quite a few years ago for Little Caesar’s Pizza. It won lots of awards and did great business for them. All it said was that the pizza was bigger. Period. Not better. Not hotter. Not faster. Not cheaper. Not anything but bigger. It’s not always possible (in fact it usually isn’t) to craft a commercial that actually has one and only one message… but it’s a good goal.

So yes… try to come up with a story… a simple one, and don’t let it get cluttered with anything that you don’t need. In the case of a nightclub, the message is probably just simply “This is the place to be.”

In television, less is more.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Marcus Perfjell]

Mark: I’m having a meeting with my friend in a couple of hours, I have a whole list of things I want to talk to him about. I wrote down a “Boy meets girl” story and I really like it, but it’s quite complex I’ll write it down later.

Somebody posted this link https://www.vimeo.com/8397060 in this thread and I think he wants something like that, I have to say that that short clip represents a feeling of the club, don’t you?

“Then he really has no idea yet what he wants.”
I’ve written down the things you mentioned about “Five questions” and if he wants the movie to be fact or feeling. Let’s see what he has to say about that.

Sorry for being so short!
I’ll get back to you when I’ve talked to my friend, once again, thanks for your professional help.

Marcus

[Mark Suszko]

The sample has a lot of those shots I talked about hating: the muddy black indistinct mass of people just standing in a huge clump or jumping around a bit in heavy backlighting while an overexposed Dj is far in the background. Notice it was shot with the Canon 7D digital still camera, adapted for video. I guess it does pretty well in low light and certainly looks “filmic”. Don’t know that the Sony you are using will look as good. Band was just meh; okay, not outstanding. That video has no story at all to it, but why do you think story and “feeling” are mutually exclusive? They need not be.

If I was working on this, I would think about a narrative thread where a guy was in boring and quiet locations, like the bus stop, library, bowling alley, car repair shop, etc. getting video clips sent to his phone from a girl he was constantly trying to meet up with, but always missing, because she’s at this club on various theme nights, when he’s expecting to meet her at these boring places like the bowling alley, the library, what-have-you.

The presence in the background of her messages of a rival guy, who apparently is getting to become her friend more and more in every installment, (he might lean into the camera shot and wave to say “hi, buddy!!!” at some point, and you’ll want to punch him) hints that there’s a chance our boy could soon lose the girl, unless he gets to that club when she’s also there.

Then I throw a reversal at the ending episode; the guy’s phone gets one more message from the girl, said she thought she saw our guy at the club on so and so night, but missed him… and we see that our guy is not watching the message, it is playing to the open air, on a table behind him, because he’s finally in the club and has instantly met someone else even nicer than the original object of his desire.

Now that’s pretty pedestrian fare, nothing we haven’t seen before, but can still sell well if executed well. Every one of the girl’s short video texts also shows a clip of something like the bands, the DJ, the food/bar shots you want so much, but now it is all in the context of a narrative structure, and this structure is motivated, so showing us the sales points of the club in this way is integrated into the structure of the story, and not just a preachy or hard-sell message.

Added edit: music. You can’t afford to use any real songs on this, you’ll need some kind of rights-cleared beats, budget for that.