How I Create Commercials At Home!

for today's shoot we'll be making three separate six second videos we'll be doing a spot for the mean bean java monster the loco mocha and finally a family video of all three of these mean bean locomocha and salted caramel [Music] [Laughter] there are beans everywhere pretty much every commercial i'm making lately is produced right here in my dining room usually how it goes down is a company sends me products we talk back and forth discuss ideas and after a brief discussion you have a pretty good idea of what it is they're looking for that fits within their timeline their budget and of course what they're trying to achieve out of creating ads in the first place a rule of thumb that i like to follow for pretty much any shorter social media ad that i'm creating is to end the video on a shot that clearly shows the products we're advertising some people will call this a hero shot some people might call it a pack shot but no matter what you like to call it i like to have this final shot last the final three seconds of our video in that remaining three seconds we can use some quick cuts to give a little bit of context maybe show off a couple of flavor profile ingredients and in that time we can show two maybe three shots when you're shooting food or beverage in this case an energy drink that's made with coffee you're going to want to make sure that you hit on those flavor profile ingredients in this case we have a flavor called mean bean it's made with real coffee and real milk we're of course going to go to the grocery store and buy some coffee beans and see how we can incorporate that into an ad my idea for this first shot is to do something kind of fun where we have a top down angle start with the can like this and let it drop into the beans this is an empty can but we're going to be using a full one to get a bigger splash so to speak generally speaking most of the ads i make i create on my own sometimes with the help of a friend or two but it's not like i have a crew behind me there's no editor no gaffer no colorist it's just myself and a buddy my sony camera in this dining room i think we've got a lighting setup that we're pretty happy with this took about 45 minutes to dial in there's beans everywhere after a few test shots we've done this is the aputure 300d mark ii this is our key light we've got it set up on a minimax stand and over here the modifier we are using is the aputure lantern but you'll notice in our shot here that we do have a bit of a hot spot on the lip of the can and that's something that i don't really love and it might seem like a small pointless detail but it is little details like that that separate amateurs from pros and i'm trying to be a pro so now this right here this is called a scrim gem it's a 4x4 sheet of diffusion in a light aluminum frame it's being held up by a couple clamps on a c stand and it does help a lot to make our light source bigger and more soft but to get rid of that hot spot we're talking about we're gonna use another sheet of diffusion here and this makes our light a lot softer as you can see our hot spot here isn't quite as hot so we're gonna go for a look that's a bit more of a high contrast lighting ratio if that makes sense and to do this the first thing i'll grab is a sheet of black foam core all this is going to do is create a bit of a shadow on this side of our frame instead of having this even lighting all the way across we now have a brighter side and a darker side and on top of that this right here this is the aputure 300x this is going to be our accent light and we do have a piece of construction paper with a slit cut out in the front which shapes the light and if i turn off my key quickly here and turn on our accent light you can see that little splash of light right there in the frame which looks really nice we'll turn our key back on and this lighting setup creates an environment that's a lot more exciting and captivating over just a flat evenly lit sort of lighting scenario so i'm just gonna kill the room light here and i'm gonna grab my bottle of water to spray on the can just to give it a sort of wet look because this is a drink that you enjoy cold gonna place it in the frame and hit record and we're just gonna drop it three two one [Music] i think a lot of people have the same dream as me to one day have maybe a small crew and a couple rigs maybe a few robots but for the time being my setup and my crew is very modest in budget relative to what other production companies are doing out there which i don't think is necessarily a bad thing if i'm able to create professional quality videos right here in my home at a fraction of the cost that's very appealing to a lot of brands because they don't always want to spend many hundreds of thousands of dollars a lot of the time my favorite shots actually happened by accident after getting that top down angle of the can dropping into the coffee beans the camera was already in 240 frames per second so i thought what would happen if we just started throwing coffee beans up towards the lens what i discovered is that if we reverse the shot and slowed it down even more with optical flow we end up with something that looks pretty unique because it appears like it was shot on a high frame rate camera at 500 frames per second but like i said it's little things like this that happen by accident that sometimes give us the coolest looking shots an absolute classic in many coffee commercials is the close-up shot where the milk is pouring into the coffee and you get that awesome cloud and contrast and color and that's exactly what i wanted to do for java as well out of camera once in a while you get a shot that doesn't look quite right but then you realize once you tweak it a little bit it actually ends up turning out pretty captivating now what's different about the locomoca flavor is that it's actually made with chocolate and trying to figure out a way to incorporate chocolate into the ad was a little bit tricky we tried melting the chocolate bars on camera this just didn't really work out and looked kind of random so instead what i did was i actually melted down the chocolate in a pot and then i poured the liquid chocolate into a bowl while it rotated on an electric turntable simple but satisfying as long as you like chocolate now the pro blends gives us a look that i don't think any other lens can achieve it can make smaller objects look larger than life and provides a really unique perspective i didn't want to just recycle the same bean explosion shot for both of our locomocha and mean bean videos so for lokomoka i decided to get really close up into the beans with the probe lens and then also drop some beans on top as we pulled away when it comes to editing every video is different oftentimes i'll find myself diving deep into practical effects masking and keying but for the most part i think my style is to try and keep things pretty simple i use a lot of basic cuts color grading and speed transitions to draw attention to specific parts of shots and if you're familiar with my channel you would know that stock footage is also something that comes in really handy for a lot of my shoots i bet you can see where this is going on a lot of the shots that we got for this java monster shoot i wanted something that looked a little bit moodier and to do that i went on story blocks and downloaded this fog overlay and placed it on top of the footage not only does this make the shot a lot moodier like i intended but it also makes a shot that was once stagnant and kind of one-dimensional and gives it more movement and more depth storyblocks is an online subscription service and with a membership plan you get unlimited downloads of high quality stock footage motion backgrounds after effects templates and overlays if you're ever in need of a quick drone shot film burn time lapse or fog overlay then go to the link down in the description below or go to storyblocks.com daniel schiffer to learn more about storyblocks now for the final group shot of all three flavors it's as simple as taking the shots that we already got for the first two products and combining those into one video at this point all we had left to do is to get a hero shot of all three cans i sprayed them with water and then we turned the light right as that condensation droplet was just running down the front of the main can [Music] [Applause] [Music] it's crazy how after several hours of planning trial and error filming and editing you end up with a final product that is so quick but hey i love it and making commercials is what gets me out of bed in the morning so i think that's all that matters [Music]

Channel: Daniel Schiffer

Views: 999,872

Keywords: daniel schiffer commercial, java monster commercial, daniel schiffer monster, daniel schiffer b roll, epic b roll, product commercial, beverage commercial, tabletop commercial

Id: kVvFaW3tWac

Length: 8min 20sec (500 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 05 2020