Making of TVA Logistics team drivers commercial

Idea

There are a lot of actions in this life that are almost perfect by their nature. There is only one way to make them better – to share them with someone.

Goal

The main purpose of this project was to highlight the fact that team driving can be as productive as interesting.

Concept

Usually, there are a lot of discussions before we get to the right concept for the project. Sometimes they can be long, sometimes they can be shorter, but almost every time there are a lot of them. And this is something normal because during these conversations and brainstormings you always get to something good. This project was not an exception.

The client wanted to promote the fact that they hire team drivers, so for us, the keyword became “team” and we came to the conclusion that we need to look for and build the concept around this idea. So, on one hand, we had to look for activities and things that are interesting and close to the truck drivers, and on the other hand, they are much more enjoyable when you do them with someone or they are simply doubled.

After a few days, the final script was ready to be submitted to the customer for approval, as well as to be sent to the pre-production department.

Pre-production

Pre-production was quite complex with many challenges, but as we like the challenges, the whole process was organized in less than two weeks. Probably the most difficult was to find the twin girls, but here with a little luck and insistent searches, everything happened quite quickly. This fact was largely due to our colleague Vitalie who knew someone, who was a friend of the twin actresses who were filmed in the commercial. The other aspects of pre-production were quite easy to manage by the members of the production team, so we got to the production stage very well prepared.

Production

The shootings lasted two days, in fact, the first four scenes on the first day and the last on the second. All five scenes were filmed in the suburbs of Chicago in two different locations.
To make everything as productive as possible, when there are several days of filming, we have made every effort to make these two days consecutive. Of course, we took into account that everyone involved could participate in those days.

In matters of preparation, such situations are sometimes more difficult to manage, but with more effort everything is possible. We were very pleased that at the end of the shooting all the people involved were satisfied, felt good, and had a good time participating in such a project.
We, as usual, had a great time too and already knew that we had good shoots on our hard drives and that a good commercial would come out, and that it would reach its purpose.

Post-production

Editing was pretty straightforward, as all the scenes were shot by the storyboard, and there were only five of them. The tricky part at the editing stage was to build the transitions between the shots. We decided to use a zoom-out transition, so the concept of continuous movement of the camera would be kept throughout the whole video.

Another key aspect of the post-production stage was to emphasize the color palette that was chosen during the pre-production stage. After the first couple of versions were created it was clear that the stylized greenish shadows and the warm highlights would be the right choice. The whole color grading process was done in DaVinci Resolve, one of the leading software for editing and color grading on the market.

Conclusion

This project is another excellent example of bringing to life an idea that was born through a lot of research and brainstorming.