Is this another Borat thing?

After seeing this commercial, I sat in stunned silence for several moments. Then the phone rang. I picked it up without even looking at the caller ID. I knew who it was calling.

“Hello mister President. Yes sir, I was watching television. Yes sir, I saw it too. I’ll get right on it.”

About a month or two later I’ve finally gotten around to working on it. Here’s the spot, an intricately assembled 1/78th scale-model of an actual train wreck. So many horrible elements have been packed into only 15 seconds it’s hard to believe. There’s a washed-up actor cameo, foreign-culture costume designs, CGI-assisted dancing, and a vapid tagline that took someone less than the run time of the spot itself to come up with (”light on your feet”).

On the bright side you get to see the girl twirl so hard at the end her dress flies off.

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The prop collar malfunctioned and well..

A friend of mine wanted to participate in a 36 hour film festival a few weeks ago, whereby you have 36 hours to shoot and edit a short film. I said no way. But much like having a friend arriving at the airport who has never thought to call a cab, I was suckered into giving someone a ride home. Wait I mean I was suckered into helping make the film.

The concept of our film was an argument between a couple that kept being interrupted by commercial breaks. (One of the characters “threw it to commercial” to buy some time to think). All in all, it definitely looked like it was planned and shot in 36 hours. Some of the other films looked really good, which really showed us up. Though in fairness a lot of them were done by serious production companies and ours was done by two people who woke up the morning the contest started with no resources and nothing planned.

I won’t subject you to the whole film, but here’s one of the better commercial spoofs we produced as part of the film. It is truly pretty good.

In general I’m a fan of commercial spoofs, as a child I really liked the “fake” Energizer bunny commercials, and in latter-days thought the Geico commercial “reveals” were very good. For additional research, please fast-forward through this movie to watch all the fake spots.

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