A UPM friend of mine was working on the Disney feature Lemonade Mouth. The script called for a faux-broadcast spot to be part of the film. He gave me a call as he knew I play in the advertising production arena. It turned out to be a really fun assignment and memorable.
The production gave us our pick of the background cast and set us loose in the high school stadium that was the primary location.
I took a small crew including my producer/editor Sterling Grant 3, one of my RED cameras and a bunch of squirt bottles filled with water.
We followed up the small 2nd unit shoot with an afternoon of tabletop in our studio with some "product" provided by the art department. Sterling ran with the footage in the edit suite, wringing the comedy out of the kids crazy slow-mo facial expressions, I put a radical bleach bypass look accentuating the blue branding and Turboblast came to life. The director of the film, Patricia Riggin, was so pleased she included the spot largely whole-cloth in the final movie and we got called back to create the background elements for large screens in the final concert scene. Sterling has since passed away but this spot will always remind me of him gleefully spraying down these poor teenagers while I filmed them at 120 fps.
