Commercial for Distracted Driving

David McDonald · February 2, 2011

Here is a short commercial I did for a local film contest in Vancouver about the dangers of distracted driving.

This was extremely low budget...maybe around $400. It was shot on Canon 7D with Zeiss 50mm 1.4, Zeiss 21mm 2.8, and Canon 70-200 2.8. The surgery scene was lit only with a small kino flo diva rigged above the actors and a 300 fresnel as a backlight in the close-ups. The fire scenes were also only lit with the one Kino, a 2K and a 300, with CTO over them....many of the lights were flickered and waved in front of to get a fire effect. The outdoor stuff was just sunlight through a 4x4 frame of diffusion.

I did all of the visual effects myself (some may not even be noticeable, like the little girl in the last shot was comped into the backseat)...There were also only 2 surgeon costumes and 1 fireman costume....so any shot with multiple actors in costume included camera tricks or compositing. All of the monitors in the surgery scene were put in the background and the actors were rotoscoped over top of them.

Please let me know what you guys think. Also I would appreciate it if you could give it the 'thumbs up' on youtube since that casts a vote for the competition. Thanks!

David Carstens · February 2, 2011

The concept and look are quite good, though I found the dramatic music a bit monotonous. Perhaps if the introduction had more of an action tone, then either transition to more comedic themes or stop entirely when the phones are introduced, the dramatic music would have more impact once we return to "serious reality" at the end. An overall tighter edit could definitely benefit the spot.

Edited February 2, 2011 by David Carstens

Phil Rhodes · February 2, 2011

But nailguns don't work like that!

P

February 2, 2011

You had me right up until the firefighter said "out". :)

Very well done piece of work.

R,

Tom Jensen · February 2, 2011

I couldn't follow the story at first. It's a tad long but other than that, it looked nice. I thought the last shot worked very well since she is obviously distracted but she does not pick up the phone.

Marcus Joseph · February 5, 2011

I liked that, it was really nicely shot, but maybe could have been tweaked with some editing, but then again maybe it would lean itself to someone else's vision altogether. Real creative concept though, I haven't really seen that done before. Also that girl driving at the end was quite pretty.

Michael Buchmann · February 25, 2011

Hi,

The idea is great. I like end with the children. Very good.

It might be a bit too long for such a spot.

Michael

David McDonald · March 3, 2011

Hi,

The idea is great. I like end with the children. Very good.

It might be a bit too long for such a spot.

Michael

^ Yeah it definitely is pretty long, but it's actually for a "short film" contest, but because of the topic, I wanted to make my "short film" more of a commercial....most other entries to the contest were more commercial/PSA style films as well. If this were a real TV spot it would definitely be cut down to 30 seconds or 60 seconds.