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Help with shooting a video commercial for a night club
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Please, please, PLEASE don’t over complicate this.
It’s a commercial. So it has ONE single overarching goal in order to be successful. It must generate significantly MORE income than it costs to create and show to it’s audience. PERIOD.
That’s it. End of story. It doesn’t matter one WHIT whether the audience loves or hates your characters – or the story – or the lighting – or the pacing – or the overall idea.
For a restaurant/bar commercial your POSSIBLE TO ACCOMPLISH goals are very simple.
If not enough people are AWARE of the business – you can increase awareness. This is why hotel video’s are typically just short tours of the in-building restaurants and bars. Awareness – is a simple and achievable goal. In certain cases that’s enough. If so, simply concentrate making the facility look as attractive and welcoming as possible.
The next typical restaurant/bar video is concerned with boosting SALES.
For this, forget all the fancy “boy meets girl” stories and concentrate on PROMOTION specials. Whatever it is, RUM night, Ladies Night, Jello wrestling, you name it and people have already done it to death. Why? Because promotion works. 99 cent Big Macs INCREASE STORE TRAFFIC – always have, always will. So no need to re-invent the wheel.Quality, lighting, storytelling, everything else is important ONLY to the extent they improve the above.
In other words, if you succeed in making people AWARE of the restaurant, but the commercial leaves them thinking the place is a dark, poorly lighted DIVE, you’re toast. Unless it is. If it is, you can fool them by making it look better – but then the spot will still fail because it will promise one thing and the experience of the product will deliver something else.
The bar/restaurant business is BRUTAL. (I know, I spent my youth working in it)
And typically, owners only try to bring advertising to bear after they’ve screwed up operations so much that even when you bring in new people, the poor operations will lose them following exposure.
Harsh, reality. But true none the less.
One final word of advice.
Get CASH up front. ALL of it. Don’t deliver ANYTHING until you’re paid in full.
Doesn’t matter how big the “parent” company is. If you don’t have an IRON CLAD contract with the owning CORPORATION (and you don’t because NOBODY does that at the level you’re talking) then CASH in hand is your ONLY real defense against getting screwed.
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You might be jaded. [Bill Davis] “For this, forget all the fancy “boy meets girl” stories and concentrate on PROMOTION specials.”
Six shots — camera shots, not booze!
Shot 1: girls walk into club
Shot 2: boy looks up from bar
Shot 3: Slo-mo of girls again
Shot 4: guy meets girl at bar
Shot 5: Guy and girl dancing
Shot 6: Guy and girl in VIP
TITLE: Call to actionSurely, you don’t think this is fancy. The call to action–about 5 seconds–is where the promotion is dropped in as needed. 6 shots in 25 seconds, that’s 4 seconds each, plenty of time for the audience to see the frame for a rack focus, move the camera, any number of bona fide camera moves.
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Bill, this isn’t a cable TV 30 second spot, this is something for the web. Maybe several somethings, is what I’m pushing. And that means we can bend some rules and even break some. His boss started out with a sort of desire for an undefined “spray the room” kind of thing just to show it off. And it may end up that way still. I’m not saying your way is wrong, only that we’re not at the stage yet where there IS a wrong or right way, particularly. Because we dont know what the owner really wants or needs yet. I understand a “hard sell” as in your example. Sometimes they are appropriate. Sometimes a “smart sell” is better. Would it surprise you if I told you that I try very hard to put the entire Campbellian “hero’s journey” into something as short as 30 seconds spots? I do, particularly for radio, but for TV as well, if I can get away with it.
Do you remember the Taster’s Choice coffee spots from a few years back? The one told in a multi-spot character arc? One of the actors from those wound up as “the Watcher” Giles in “Buffy” later. At the time, all the coffee commercials were pretty hard sell, and they all pushed the same things, freshness and flavor, mmm. Then comes along these series of spots with an ongoing romance story across something like six 30-second spots, and the entire freaking country was talking about them and watching them. Needing to see how it ended, they watched the commercials as if they were shows, which, in micro-scale, they WERE. And that’s not a new idea: variations of that were done on radio since the thirties and 40’s. But people forgot that they could do such a thing.
Nightclubs seem a good fit for this little narrative arc concept I outlined, but there are plenty of other ways to go, mine was just one example. However, when you’re selling a nightclub, you are not selling food and drink and music, you are not selling 4 whitewall tires installed for $229.99, you are selling an image, you are selling wish fulfilment. You are creating a very specific brand identity, and so you may need a little more finesees than “get drunk and get lucky in jig time, for cheap, at Maxie’s Bar and Grill”.
There’s a place for those kind of spots too, but I’m hoping Marcus here can aspire to something bigger. If only because you don’t make money on the cheap one-off spots compared to a planned campaign of spots and virals.The local cableco can churn out plenty of that kind of cheap spot for zero cost. The club makes more money the longer you stay in it. The spots make more money the longer the audience stays with them, but you have to give them something to reward that viewing.
Anyhow, nothing again to do with lighting, and sorry for that, but I just wanted to explain where I was coming from on this approach.
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Thanks for your tips! I talked to my friend at the night club, and he and the owner basically just wants some cool shots of the night club sort of “this is what you get”. no story, too complicated.
I test filmed yesterday with the EX1 and I got really disapointed over the results, I think i need a LED-lamp to even see peoples faces. I’m uploading the movie right now and will post it here when it’s done.
Thanks for your post!
The fall of building 7 is a bit weird.
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[Marcus Perfjell] “the owner basically just wants some cool shots of the night club sort of ‘this is what you get'”
Clients, sometimes gotta hate ’em.
Try as we might, you can’t always help people have good taste… or make the right choices.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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“Forget it, Jake, its Chinatown”.
It was a fun creative exercise anyway, Todd, and the give and take about structure was not a waste, it may eventually help someone else.
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Yes I hope this thread will help somebody more than me, you gave me alot of tips Mark!
Talked to my friend today and he and the owner really liked what I shot the other day so I’m just doing the “this is what you get” kind of video..Thanks for everything!
The fall of building 7 is a bit weird.
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Mark,
With all respect because you’re the author of a lot of the MOST valuable content on this board…
I still have to respectfully disagree.The issue is advertising fundamentals. You cite campaigns like the Tasters Choice work from some years ago – but it’s a poor comparison because General Foods is able to achieve something that the OP here cannot. The term in formal advertising practice is “reach and frequency.”
This kind of soft branding campaign ONLY works if there is enough media purchased to support TRAINING the audience to be aware of, and then care about, the people they’re watching.
Look, from Age 19 to 28 or so, I worked in the bar and restaurant industry. Starting as a DJ in a local upscale club, and ending up with responsibility for programming for a medium size subgroup of hotel bar/restaurants for one of the biggest name hotel chains in the world.
I’ve sat in countless meetings, and run countless more where the discussions have been trying to find the right balance of advertising, promotions, marketing and operating essentials required to keep a club or restaurant both popular and profitable. So I know something about this topic.
If the path to success was as simple as creating a video spot with a pretty girl and a pretty guy meeting in the club and going off together dancing, followed by a call to action tag, I could have become a marketing GENIUS at 24 – because I’ve done that spot about half a dozen times.
It’s more complicated than that. Not to bore you with details, but consider just these few sub-considerations.
Should the club cater JUST to the age/demographic of the boy/girl pictured? Are liquor sales ALL that matter here? What about the food side of the operations? Are there other issues that might be hampering club success? If we concentrate on the clubbing aspects, does that make us vulnerable vis a vis Monday to Thursday business? Are there significant Parking? Location issues? Would it be MORE effective if we addressed those in the spot?
This is why good advertising tends to steer away from opinions and deals to the extent possible with facts. And that means research. Someone has to talk to the customers of THIS bar and try to find out what it’s individual strengths and weaknesses might be. Then you build a spot that takes into consideration those – AND what the club or overall operation needs to accomplish in order to balance those needs with the other needs of the larger operation. Perhaps Mon-Fri the hotel or restaurant is filled with 40-60 year old business types. If so, will trolling for hip 20 year olds for Fri/Sat cause you un-forseen conflicts.
Look, I’m not trying to be negative. If you believe in your spot – go for it. The WORST that will happen is that business won’t go up and you’ll have problems collecting your money. Both survivable annoyances.
If, however, you want to build a career doing this kind of promotional video – it will benefit you greatly if the first one succeeds. And your chances of that happening can only INCREASE if you don’t approach this by thinking of the kind of production that YOU would like – but rather thinking about the kind of production that will PRODUCE THE BEST RESULTS for the client.
Good luck.
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Marcus,
In the spirit of being helpful. The next time you shoot in the club, think about two things.
First – light the WALLS first.
This forms a bright background against which people’s silhouettes can be seen. You can go NUTS with color on this background lighting – or you can use white lights and dimmers – but the object is to get a sense of depth and space by lighting the perimeter first.Second – as you suggested, you need to light the faces of the PEOPLE in your foreground shots. An on-camera light or handheld broad spot or small LED array is a good choice for this. You really should have a dedicated light for each person you want to “pop” out of the background. And you can let them move through the light or follow them – your choice.
If you keep ALL other lighting at a minimum so the overall room is dark – typical for a bar/restaurant anyway – you can is focus your audience on the individuals and let the room serve as a background.
Finally, and as always don’t forget to shoot cutatways!
Close ups of room decor, lighting, swish pans of the dancers, bold moving sweeps of areas – all these can all be used in composites. Just look for beautiful things and people. The backlighted bottles on the bar. The candles on the tables. An elegant ear and earing in XCU.
Have fun.
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I realized that in my above post, I started out by responding to Mark’s comments, then switched to responding to the OP without making that clear.
Sorry.
I doubt Mark wants a new career in Advertising. He’s wise. After my stint in the restaurant bar industry – my new wife and I opened and operated an Advertising Agency and ran it for half a dozen years prior to discovering that my first love was video production and concentrating on that.
Such is life.
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