One thing about taking on a new role at Georgia-Pacific… you hit the ground running. March Madness is such a fun part of American sports and we have tons of certified sports nuts working at GP. Our Social Media team was looking for some way to have a little fun with the basketball tournament. So I quickly sketched out a storyboard and hatched a plan with lead on our intranet to recruit ‘actors’ for the spot. This turned out to be so much fun.
We filmed entirely in GP Studios, Studio A, located in Georgia-Pacific’s headquarters. A 2600 square foot space with a 3 wall hard cyc so we were able to get the nice, neutral white limbo for the backdrop. Camera was the Sony FS7 set up for 4k, 23.98. We put out an open casting call for any and all employees at GP HQ to come on down in intervals over a 4 hour period.
Ending scene of the spot.
Using the storyboard for a guide, I had most of the talent perform most of the lines and scenes so we had lots of options in Post for the assembly. With the huge space of Studio A, we were able to let the employees cut loose with the basketball and got some great moves on camera. The GP Dubuque facility makes pizza boxes, so we incorporate that into the piece and it was hilarious watching the employees try to spin a pizza box like a basketball.
Pizza boxes make good pom poms too!
Believe it or not the hardest part of the entire shoot was getting a vertical stack of 26 Dixie cups to stay in place. The tallest basketball player ever was 8 foot and 1/2 inch. I wanted to visually show that height with the cups.
We had to hide a pole and white tape on the cups to make it appear it was self-standing.
The original idea was to scotch tape them together, but the tape would not stick to the Perfect Touch outer shell. DP and Director of Studio Operations, Brad Hinton rigged a tall pole into the lighting grid. We used the lids as an interlocking device, you can see the dark strips at every second cup. Very thin strips of white gaffer’s tape to the hold the stack to the pole and voila! We had a stable stack of Dixie Cups.
The pole and tape hid perfectly, I only had to mask off the top of the pole.
I cut the piece in Adobe Premiere Pro and did the color grade using both the Adobe Lumetri tool and Red Giant’s Magic Bullet Color Suite to really give the piece a punch. The piece recently premiered on GP’s Facebook Page. Enjoy the spot and Happy March Madness everybody!