Commercial for 2007 Mailing Deadlines for Troops

WOW! That's how I best sum up this commercial! The GOOD IDEA FAIRY had her jets on for this project. On the success of the story about the holiday mailing deadlines, I was asked to do a 30 second commercial to be played on AFN. Once again I had total freedom to do whatever I wanted to convey the message. The jets were on full blast as this project went from idea, to concept, to shooting, to editing, to being distributed all over the world in 24 hours! Welcome to Army Broadcasting. The actor in this commercial is SSG Coffelt a former Drill Sergeant. I came up with the concept and he hammered out the details. As soon as we were happy with the script we went out back and shot it. That only took about 2 hours and another 2 hours of editing and then it was up to DVIDS who distributed it to AFN networks to play that day.One full-bird Colonel declared upon seeing it, "Well I sure as hell got the message!" To budding filmmakers: Using the Sony PD-170 camera I white balanced on SSG Coffelt's uniform which is equivalent to using a green warm card. That makes the sky bluer and gives a nice natural pink to the skin. For his close camera work, I used a wide angle attachment to give the feeling that he was really in the audience's face. For the final shot the camera was low to the ground and I used two bounce cards to under-light his face. This is something like you would see in a horror movie. I think it was effective.