Fruition — Commercial

I frequently collaborate with my friend and colleague, DP Seth Haley, and this is one of the projects we’ve worked on together. It was a direct-to-client commercial produced on a shoe-string budget, and because Seth and I were given complete creative control we took it as an opportunity to run with some pre-existing ideas we already had brewing at the time. 

With the help of a few friends, we shot this commercial over the course of two days. Day one was spent shooting INT scenes. A friend was kind enough to open their home to us and we shot scenes with our lead talent in almost every room, following an artist’s search for inspiration. On day two, we all piled into cars and headed into downtown Chicago to shoot various EXT scenes with the same theme in mind. And to tie it all together, my good friend, Samantha Wahlen, wrote a beautiful voice over script that added emotional and literary depth to the piece.

It was a very run-and-gun shoot, and Seth and I wore multiple hats to pull it off. But the elements all came together and we ended up with some gorgeous footage we were very proud of. To this day, it is one of my favorite projects… not because of the scale, pay or crew size, but because of what a few of us were able to pull off with very limited resources. And even though the client never released the final piece, it was creatively fulfilling to produce.