White Walls + Colorful People // Cincinnati Video Production
The DRIVE Media House team took over the third floor of Cincinnati's abandoned Jim Beam factory for a special shoot last month. We had the opportunity to create a commercial for Zakta, a search engine that organizes search results into colored categories, making it a very unique way to surf the web. In a busy city, one might think that the hardest part about this shoot would have been finding the perfect location: an entirely white, entirely empty, and entirely HUGE room to film roughly 75 extras in. But no, that wasn't the challenge. The real challenge was getting those 75 people to come!
Making people aware of the fact that we needed extras was tough. Of course you can make flyers and cover every bulletin board and telephone pole in the city with them, but are people really going to stop and read it? Probably not. Our team strives to ATTRACT, ENGAGE, and DRIVE people to take action, and that is exactly what we had to do with advertising for extras. We believe in the power of social media when it comes to these three steps. (That's why we do what we do, which is create social media and web-based video content).
To ATTRACT, we made an appealing and CONCISE web-based "flyer" to get the word out. We pretty much took over all social media platforms for a week straight. Sorry friends, I know when you logged onto Facebook, just about every post you saw was about being an extra in our commercial. As all the youngins are saying these days, "#SorryNotSorry".
To ENGAGE, the flyers and posts had to give instructions as to what the viewer should do next. We made sure that anytime someone would see that we needed extras, there would be the opportunity to engage. For instance, there would always be an email address or phone number to contact us if someone could come. We also encouraged people to interact and get the word out to friends or strangers on the street (sorry Mom!). Word-of-mouth isn't as dead as you might think.
Finally, to DRIVE, we offered pizza. Simple as that. Oh, and the opportunity for these extras to be in a national commercial.
As you'll see in this Behind-the-Scenes video, the idea of this commercial was for everyone to start off wearing grey and black, wandering around mumbling things as the camera moved through the crowd toward a girl in a red dress. As the camera zooms in on her, the crowd quickly changed into colorful clothing and organized themselves into groups wearing similar colors. It was a hectic concept but everyone was so cooperative!
We had so many friends show up to help us, but also some people who we had never even met before! That was great to see--that people still get fired-up about being a part of something even if they don't know anyone involved. So take a few minutes and watch this Behind-the-Scenes recap of how our Zakta commercial shoot went. You can get a feel for our on-set process and hopefully you'll want to be an extra next time we flood your news feeds with "WE WANT YOU! WE NEED YOU!".