Making it a family affair... "The Missing Element"

All work and no play makes for a boring day!

It is nice to be able to share you love for filmmaking and tell interesting stories not only with customers, but with friends and family.

The opportunity to include my little girl and some friends came about for this video when my wife said to me "you guys should film a commercial for that Doritos contest and oh, by the way, you should write a script that uses kids so you can cast your little girl!" I've learned that when your wife makes a suggestion, you should give it a lot of consideration! ;-)

So I came up with a concept and wrote a script. The script had three characters, a little girl (hubby points achieved) and two boys. Since I'm a firm believer that we should write scripts around locations that we can actually use, this shoot would be on a one location, lab location.

I called my friend Matt McGharen and asked if his two boys would be interested in appearing in the commercial. His boys were more than willing so we schedule the shoot.

I told my frequent collaborator Matt Green what I was doing and he wanted in on it because he just likes to shoot!

We convened at my wife's school where she teaches and has access to a lab.

The original script had my wife appearing and when we shot the footage I thought it all would fit nicely into the 30 second required time-frame. You don't realize how fast thirty seconds goes by until you finish the first draft and it clocks in at 48 seconds.

I first cut my wife's appearance (a couple of hubby points deducted). I was able to cut a few more shots that really didn't move the story forward which got me down to about 34 seconds. From there, I cut transitions between each shot that quickened the pace and got the overall time down to 30 seconds.

Our little contest commercial didn't win any prizes, but it did allow our family and friends to work together and have a lot of fun. Plus, now we have this 30 second slice of when our kids were young AND we got some good experience in telling a story in 30 seconds.