At what stage did you become involved in the production – did you pitch with a treatment and what was the original brief?

As the director I was approached by JWT with a storyboard and an initial brief. The agency’s main concern was to find a director that would feel at home doing both the college type of humour, shooting a music video and find messed up metaphoric clips for the three films as well as editing it all together to really craft it. That was the brief. SO the best way i could impress them was by doing a look and feel edit based on various clips, music videos and live action scenes stolen from various films and videos. This way I could convince them and myself that I had the right understanding of the job and humour that they needed in order to capture the target audience.

Was it some other piece of work that you had directed that warmed you to the creatives?

Funnily enough it was another film I did which was nothing like this job. The job they had seen were my two films for American gas company CITGO. I rarely do comedy but to be honest I had a blast and probably hadn’t laughed so much in many years. Think about it… board meeting where 10 top creatives discuss what the best metaphors for male masturbation are and what they look like. It was hilarious.

Any chance of the campaign going global, we ask wishfully?

We would love it TV and cinema wise, and in a way it is since it also lives on the net which was a big part of JWTs media plan, which is a masterpiece in it self. As far as we know it will be shown in 15-20 countries on TV.

How did the campaign evolve – was it always intended that it would include live action, animation, stock footage set to a pop promo?

Yes, initially the films were a lot more offensive and bizarre since we were using YouTube clips in the first edit. But we had a hard time clearing the majority of the clips so we had to go with Getty Images and other stock libraries but Getty was extremely helpful in helping us dig up cool and funny clips. The idea was based around this eclectic mix of all kinds of media to better reflect the target audience media landscape.

What were the main challenges of the production and how did you resolve them?

The main challenges were many since the films consisted of three music video shoots, three live action shoots and finding hundreds of funny clips not to mention the composition of the music tracks.

The videos portraying the Sprite Truth Band had to feel real and not comedic in any way. It was important for the balance of the films that it was not all slapstick and silliness that there was some kind of serious edge to the. But then broken up by the extremely offensive and funny YouTube and Getty clips. So casting for the video was really hard. It was hard finding singers that could lip-sync to the studio tracks but who would feel real and true to the songs. It also involved a lot of choreography to get the feel of the band right.

The live action part was the easiest bit since we were blessed with great actors from the get go.

The other hard parts were finding all the right clips. We had to look through literally thousands of clips on YouTube and Getty before finding the right ones and then constantly trying to fit them into the edit to see if they worked.

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