In April 2025, I approached Jeremy A. of Selluloid Pictures with a proposal: to create two to three modern spec commercials. I was cruising through YouTube and knew we could hit this level of production with a solid execution.
Funny enough, I was rebuffed the first time I brought it up to him. He scoffed and countered; Selluloid Pictures wouldn't join the project unless the scope was increased to nine specs. That would be a worthy and economically sensible challenge to pursue, he claimed.
Dejected, I stewed at home for days. At best, the new ask was triple the original amount of ads and I had no idea how this would ever happen. Nine ads. Was Jeremy crazy?
No. Maybe, he was right. It didn't really matter in the end. Nothing would happen one way or another if I continued to look away from the challenge at hand. So I rolled up my sleeves and got to work.
What followed was a mad dash to propagate ideas in order to fulfil this heavy quota. As each idea was formulated, I translated it into an A/V script.
The below example of an A/V script is from our Chips Ahoy! ad:
Once the A/V scripts for all nine scripts was completed, we discussed them over a video call and made adjustments. Jeremy had just moved around 40 minutes further away from me so I'm thankful we are in this era of video calls. It made collaborating on this project so much easier given the distance.
In parallel, I leaned on my project management skills to juggle the nine projects and the workflow of the project. I forgot to mention that we were originally planning on filming all nine ads over the course of a few days' production, right? By creating a shared online tracker and reference deck, it helped communicate my vision to Jeremy in a more precise way.
Here's a pic of the deck I created in GSlides below:
I'm not the greatest at drawing, so I usually create my storyboards in a magazine clipping style - if I have to do the boards myself. It takes a bit, but the necessity of clearly communicating your vision to your team so outclasses any inner reluctance to do them.
Here's some boards I did for our Teddy Grahams ad below:
Eventually, I got us to the point where five of the nine ads' storyboards were OK'd by both of us. Two of the ideas I had required an actor/model, so we agreed to put those off for later. From there, it was just a matter of wrapping up a couple ideas and it was off to production!
We filmed assets for the seven ads over two 12+ hour days. The second day was dedicated to the stop motion ads exclusively and my back was aching after day two for sure. It was me doing the stop motion animating after all and it was my first time doing so in this sort of super controlled environment.
During the editing process, I quickly assembled the ads and laid down some temp dialogue so that we could prototype the ads together and make sure everything worked according to plan. Of course, inevitably things could always go better, and two of our ads didn't make the cut even after extensive work on them during this phase.
Once the edits were locked, I handed the project off to Jeremy remotely and he put the polish on the project by handling the coloring, VFX, and other animation. It was at this stage that another ad didn't quite make it to our expectations, and we cut it from this current release window.
Overall, it was a good collaboration and we were happy with the results. We hope you will be as well! I'd like to try another batch of spec ads soon as there's a couple ads we didn't film at all due to needing to cast for them. Who knows? Maybe that could be the theme for next time. Live action specs...
For now, if you'd like to check out four of our released spec ads, please head on over to the portfolio page and check them out!
- J