Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/78511
Cutting Comedy Spots And the agency copywriter got a voiceover artist with that deep, Barry White voice." Beau Leon did the color correction at New Hat/LA; Beast San Francisco con- formed the spot. Lagerhausen enjoys cutting comedy as his This lady gets doubly lucky in Double Impact for Liquid Plumr, which was cut at Beast SF on Final Cut Pro. storyboarded action. "Every take was good, so it came down to the subtleties and nuances." And to serendipitous moments like the take Lagerhausen selected of the woman unpinning her hair. She shakes her head to let her hair float free and a big strand gets caught in her mouth resulting in extra lip action to lick it away. "It was unintentional but so ridicu- lous and funny at the same time — a happy accident," he reports. "The guy with the mel- ons did all kinds of improvisations — some of them out of control! I had to walk the line between keeping it funny and not getting cheesy. There were often subtler moments that were funnier than over-the-top ones." Cutting on an Apple Final Cut Pro system, he says the structure of the spot came together "right away," including the animated demo segment. Then came the all-important audio enhancements. "They were trying to get a Barry White music track, but it was too expensive," Lager- hausen recalls. "Luckily, I found a track with a Barry White feel that worked out really well. work on Double Impact makes clear. "With other genres, the music or sound effects help determine the pacing, but with comedy it's about rhythm and reactions — or lack of them. What makes comedy really interesting is that if you linger on a shot too long you can potentially kill the humor, or if you cut too soon you can miss the reaction. But if you find the beats and moments that are special, you can take things to a new level." DIRECTV: "GET RID OF CABLE" With nine spots airing in less than a year, DirecTV's "Get Rid of Cable" campaign from Grey/NY tells the stories of disgruntled cable subscribers whose dismay at their cable bill or waiting too long for the cable guy triggers a preposterous series of can-you-top-this events. In Pizzeria, a subscriber seeks comfort at his parents' home only to discover them in a communal love nest, which leads the dis- traught son to crash his car through a pizze- ria window. Dinner Party follows a subscriber unleashing his venom through karate lessons, which takes him hurdling over rooftops as the superhero Fist of Goodness, losing his footing and plunging through a skylight to an apartment where a party is underway. Funer- al finds a bored subscriber looking out a window to see guys stowing a body in the trunk of a car. Realizing he needs to vanish, he fakes his own death and attends his funeral in disguise. David-Inc. cuts Cedar package SAN FRANCISCO — For editor Jay Herda of David-Inc., in SF and LA, the 2012 summer commercial cam- paign for Cedar Fair Amusement Parks and long-time client Cramer-Krasselt found him spending several months in Chicago on the collaboration. Shot by director Ted Pauly at Furlined, the comedic spots called on Herda's fine-tuned talent for "cutting funny." In the signature Embrace spot, the key in the edit was to "keep it relatable," Herda explains. "The boy's Embrace for Cedar Fair Amusement Parks was edited by David-Inc.'s Jay Herda in FCP. reaction [to his mother due to fear, embracing a handsome young stranger on a roller coaster…] is price- less. And so is the jumping back to her usual role as mom as she fixes what she can by offering for her family to get funnel cake — and the family moves on." For Herda, Embrace includes a moment when viewers realize this is a family story. "Finding that moment was the trick. We found a simplicity in its truth, and that represents the moments we remember from amusement parks: a bit of vulnerability from something new, a way to be real and really excited. And a con- nection from experience when most of the family time is just at home." The Cedar package was fun to work on, says Herda, and it grew to a larger, five-spot campaign. "One of the other tricks of bringing comedy to these spots was having endurance," he adds. "Finding that special moment for each character in each spot is paramount, in the first day of the edit, or the last day of a month of editing. That special or real moment for each character: that's what the audience will find funny — hold onto — and hopefully stick with enough to be memorable." The spots were cut in Final Cut Pro. 34 Post • August 2012 www.postmagazine.com Gavin Cutler of New York City's Macken- zie Cutler (www.mackcut.com) edited the first two rounds of six spots; colleague Erik Laroi cut the third round of Pizzeria, Dinner Party and Funeral. "As the rounds have gone on, you wonder are these [new spots] going to be as good as the first?" says Laroi. "But all three rounds are very solid. The scenarios offer endless possibilities — you always won- der what's next in these chains of events." With each story vignette lasting just three to six seconds "everything has to be tight and planned out," says Laroi. That's where director Tom Kuntz of MJZ/LA comes in. "Tom is so cinematic, and everything is framed perfectly: Those creeping dolly moves, those quick transitional elements all add to that foreboding unease you sense as the story unfolds. The agency has had the same creative team since the beginning, so every- one's on the same page." Laroi calls the spots' comedy "dark, sub- versive humor. If you play them without the voiceover they feel like surreal, creepy short films." Although the format for the spots has remained constant throughout the campaign, it still offers a degree of flexibility. "They are prescriptive in structure, but Tom and I did play around a lot," he explains. "Not every scene needed to start exactly the same way. We also gravitated toward the subtler per- formances. A small tilt of the head, a slight eye twitch did enough to register the emo- tion of the character." Broader gestures would have "overwhelmed or overcrowded the spot," he notes. While tightly storyboarded to show the progression of events, the spots are shot with "quite a bit of coverage so I can play around a