Sequinart: Making Sparkling TV

August 9, 2011
By Luke Witcomb | No Comments

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We won the pitch primarily on the strength of our musical jingle demo. The client said on first hearing it, “it’s so annoying, it’s perfect”.

But I still had to lock down the visuals. The client wanted an ad similar to the one we’d made for them in 2009 which had been running successfully ever since, except this time they wanted to make the product, Sequin Art, appear cooler to 8-12 year olds, by basically making the advert bigger, brighter and more fun. They also insisted on the inclusion of another character – a younger sister, oh and they liked the idea of a dance routine.

I immediately planned to shoot this as a music video by choreographing every action to hit the beat and match the lyrics. I also wanted the camera to be constantly on the move, the actors to have a background in dance, the set and wardrobe colours to be vibrant, and more sparkles than Disney World at Christmas.

Which propelled casting and set-design to the top of the priority list.

Both were made trickier than normal by having TWO clients – a UK client and a French one. So not only did both the cast and the set have to work equally well in each country, I needed to get everything cleared by two clients, whose ideas didn’t always match.

Anyway following an extensive nationwide casting call and audition process, involving the agency (and both clients) we eventually cast two unrelated girls who believe it or not both lived within 5 miles of our studios. And the actress playing their mum only came from London, so no long journeys or overnights for any of the cast.

To gain maximum control over pretty much everything from lighting to flexibility of space for movement of both the camera and the actors I opted to build a bedroom set in our studio rather than shoot in a real bedroom on location.

But that had budgetary implications. Do I spend the larger part of the (limited) budget (to cover design, build and props) on a designer, and risk only being left with pennies to decorate the set and buy props, or do I just design and decorate it myself, leaving more funds to put towards better furniture and props.

Had I only known the hole I was digging. I chose to do everything myself. Other than an entrance door for the room, which was constructed and supplied by a scene builder, who also very kindly helped me bolt all the walls of the set together, I was on my own.

Now the main problem with this was I had just come off a long run of shooting commercials back to back, leaving me just 2 days over a weekend to decorate and dress the set, oh and buy all the furniture and props. For an English and French 12 year old girls bedroom.  Cripes.

Being a 12 year old has implications I’d never anticipated. Long conversations with sales staff in virtually every furniture/house-wares/haberdashery store in Norwich educated me in its significance. It is, I learned, the transition age from childhood to teen-dom. So a typical 12 year old girl would have things in her room from when she was younger, but she’d also start having things that older teens are into. So I found myself questioning every decision from ‘would you find this skirting board in a French family’s house?’ to ‘is this bed cover right for the age group?’

Oh and has anybody tried buying a bed from a shop that you can actually take home that same day? Not as easy as I thought. Probably should have gone with a set designer, they’d have known these things. Oh well I only have myself to blame.

After a long weekend of painting and decorating and successfully rounding up volunteers to help me build flat pack wardrobes and assemble beds I was just about ready for Monday’s lighting and camera test day. 10 hours to get my head back into Directors mode before the shoot on Tuesday. But it was also a team-building exercise because I’d been so busy this was the first opportunity to bring together the dance Choreographer, my new DOP, the lighting gaffer and the camera assistant. In between setting the lights, plotting camera positions and working out where to lay the tracks for the dolly, this team had to gel.

And after all the effort, the shoot day dawned. In attendance, two children, two chaperones, two agency bods, two English clients, two French clients, not to mention the crew. No pressure then.

Thankfully by lunch time the French clients were so happy with what they were seeing they went off leaving us to it. The young actresses were amazing; they coped brilliantly with repeated takes and with a little encouragement from the choreographer and myself lost all inhibitions and danced around freely for the final scene.

And they were STILL smiling at the end of a very long day. Crucially, so too were the agency and client.

In fact everyone left on a high, happily humming the ever so catchy, and now definitely annoying, Sequin Art song that they’d heard on playback all day.

I couldn’t wait to start adding all those lovely sparkles in post. Magnifique!

- Luke Witcomb Director’s Blog