Doritos Crash The Superbowl Competition Entry

This was the first ever film project I  produced with the super talented Joshua Wong of The Laundromatte. We'd talked about producing and directing some quality story driven content together for years. Separately I'd managed his band Noughts and Exes (arguably the most famous Indie Band in Hong Kong) for some time and worked with him on the popular musical flashmob video we did for their song Hearts as well as lending some small support for their previous award winning music video The Start Of Us , but now it was finally time to do something with a narrative behind it.

Joshua Wong

You may be aware that every year Doritos hosts a competition called "Crash The Superbowl" where they invite film-makers from all over the world to submit their idea for a 30 second commercial for Doritos. The winner would be featured as their actual commercial at The Superbowl - the most watched event on television - and would also receive a cash prize of US$1 million. This certainly all sounded very appealing, however the main reason we selected this competition as the first time to work together on a film-type project was because there was a finite timeline! And it was soon! This would mean that there was no way we could put off taking action again for months or even years and instead we'd be forced to come up with an idea, pull together the actors locations and props, shoot it, edit it and submit it in a total time period of about 10 days!

Right off we go...

First thing was the concept. Josh came up with a fantastic idea within no time flat (that is his specialty, along with directing, editing and composing music), I loved it so it was a go. Next we needed a crew. Enter the supremely skilled Derrick Fong:

I AM DERRICK FONG

He has shot everything from New York Indie Films, to Japanese TV Shows to Bollywood Blockbusters, so was clearly the man for the job!

Then we needed our actors. As it was an action piece, I contacted my good friend Harry Oram who in addition to his own very strong acting background (Transformers 4, Dragonblade alongside Jackie Chan, John Cusack & Adrian Brody) also happens to be connected to a crew of top quality action actors that he works with regularly. He quickly came on board and brought with him Temur Mamisashvili, Philippe Joly and our lead actor Tom Caserto.

Philippe, Harry & Temur 

Tom Caserto

Lastly we just needed our heroine in distress, which was filled by the beautiful and talented Katey Daniel who has danced, sung and acted her way across two of the world's biggest continents. 

Kate Daniel

The stage was all set and now I had the basic pieces in place, it was time to figure out location and shoot times. Because of everybody's busy timetables and the fast approaching deadline we had to settle for a single overnight shoot, with all of us heading straight to work the morning after. Location-wise we picked the back streets of Kwun Tong, partly for their enclosed, threatening, industrial feel and partly because no one is ever there late at night, so less chance of our production getting shot down.

With everything locked into place we headed to the location a couple of evenings later to both plan and rehearse all the complicated stunt moves. Then once we had them down, there was nothing left to do but shoot, so the next day that's exactly what we did. From 9pm we set-up and shot a series of wild action scenes in the back streets of Kwun Tong with minimal preparation and even less precautions. Our team kicked, flipped, punched and flew around, running up walls, bounding over obstacles and destroying the special props we'd prepared for them to smash to pieces. By 5am we were done. Breakfast and off to work. A tough, but incredibly rewarding night.

The Whole Crew

From there it went into Josh's hands for editing and for a solid week he edited like a madman, whilst his cousin worked on sound and foley. As the deadline approached we were ready and up it went.

The initial response from the public was good and we were hopeful. Sure enough when it got to the 1st round of judging we made it through. Into the 2nd round now, exciting times! We waited and watched to see what would happen next. Competition was fierce and our vote rating went up and down agains the remaining competitors. Then we received a mail... We were through to the semi-finals! We had officially become the only entry from Asia to make it through to the semi-finals and were now considered one of the top 20 submissions in the world out of thousands of entries from all over the world.

Sadly we did not make it to the final 5 and that was as far as we got. Nevertheless, we were extremely happy with the result and we even got a small cash prize, which covered the costs of producing it. We'd come out the other end a bit more experienced, we had produced our first action piece, it had done extremely well on an international level and we'd made new friends and had loads of fun doing it.

If you've read this far and didn't watch the clip, scroll back to the top to see what it was all about. Hope you enjoyed it and keep reading to see a bunch of other exciting projects we worked on after this one. 

Hydraulic Workshop & Crane Repair

Alatas crane services worldwide is a large multi-national company that supplies crane parts and crane services from 8 different offices across the globe. This includes repairs of crane motors, pumps, winches and gearboxes at their hydraulic workshops. 

I was introduced to Alatas by my good friend Chris Wright who has a strong background in corporate video though he works primarily in recruitment now. At that moment the Alatas Hong Kong team were looking to put together a video that would give a good showcasing of their hydraulic workshop and it's services, especially focussing on their crane motor repairs.

One of the challenges of this project was that engineering in general and the servicing of cranes in specific, is not generally considered a very exciting topic, but it was very important to Alatas that we did not produce the sort of documentary style voice-over led video that is common among across the entire engineering industry. Rather they wanted something short, attractive and fast moving that would at the same time give a very clear understanding of all their services and key points of quality to even a person unfamiliar with their industry casually watching the video. Obviously hitting both of these aims simultaneously meant we had our work cut out for us. Luckily we were helped by the fact that they have a beautiful workshop which is kept in immaculate condition, as you can see from the photos below:

     

 

In any case we decided to go for it full throttle and set about shooting a relatively fast-paced video of the journey of a crane motor through the Alatas Hydraulic Workshop. The main reference videos we had to work with (representing some of the best existing videos of a similar nature) were over 20 minutes long, shot in a dull 70's Open University documentary style and accompanied by lengthy and incredibly boring explanatory voiceovers. We decided to scrap this format entirely and go for a 5 minute long, high energy, music driven video with just a few titles integrated into the scenes to act as extra guidance for what's going on. In general though, I think you can follow the linear voyage of the motor through the workshop from arrival to dismantling, cleaning, repairing, re-assambly and testing without needing to pay attention to the titles.

Well we think we did a pretty good job of taking what is quite far from being the most riveting and exciting subject matter and transforming it into a fairly fast-moving and engaging video, in the process altering the ages old documentary format of engineering videos. Apparently we're not alone in our general regard of ourselves, as over 30,000 engineers from all over the world have watched the video making it one of the most popular videos on the net from the crane repair / hydraulic workshop / hydraulic motor category. Have a look and see what you think:

PizzaExpress Hong Kong Showcase Video!

Well I have to say that I have been a very long time fan of the PizzaExpress brand, specifically 20 years long since I first went to London as a student in 1993. The idea that I could eat fantastic fresh baked Italian style pizza for a budget within my pretty limited student range and even get to see the Pizzaola tossing the dough, all seemed a bit unreal to me coming from the PizzaHut dominated land of Hong Kong. So when they came to me all that time later and asked if I would be interested to work on a new showcase video for them, as you can imagine I very enthusiastically said "YES". 

Before we could get started on the video itself, we needed to attend meetings and have lots of discussion time, this meant lots and lots of delicious pizza and pasta and along with Spiriteca (importers of incredible whiskey and other rare spirits), was one of the most enjoyable build-ups to a job I have ever experienced! 

Now there are probably a lot of things about PizzaExpress that you don't know. Firstly the company was started when Peter Boizot went to Italy in 1948 and saw real Pizzaolas tossing dough in the air for the first time in his life. He vowed to bring this Italian tradition back to England with him and succeeded in doing so in 1965 with a Pizza oven from Rome and a chef from Sicily. 

Another thing you may not know is that PizzaExpress has been a major supporter of jazz music since they started doing jazz performances at their Dean Street location in London in 1969. Some of the jazz greats that have been featured there are Ella Fitzgerald, Amy Winehouse, Norah Jones and Jamie Cullum. 

And did you realise that PizzaExpress is helping to prevent Venice from sinking? In 1977 they created the Pizza Veneziana and from then till today a percentage of every one sold goes to the Venice in Peril Fund. 

You get the idea - it's an interesting company that does some unexpected stuff. 

Back to our little project. So the mandate was quite straightforward - make a beautiful video that captured the various key elements of PizzaExpress: the location, the design and art which they support, the commitment to high quality super fresh ingredients, the pursuit of the most traditional Italian ways of pizza preparation, the fun, relaxed atmosphere and of course most important - the customers! 

Well a lot to pack into a short 1.5 minute video, but I think we did a pretty good job of it! And by the way, we also created the 3D animated version of their logo at the top of this page :-)

Check out the final video we made here: