Rebuilding a Warrendale Appliance Commercial in 24 Hours

Warrendale Appliance Original Commercial Idea

Change is good? Yes, it is!

Sound and Vision Media has been working with Warrendale Appliance of Waltham for many years to create fun, entertaining, and engaging content and commercials that engage the audience. This past month, we had yet another chance to create some excitement for their August promotion.

Our commercial idea featured a female news anchor, played by the talented Halle Curley, a local actress who brings a fresh voice that can connect to the audience, along with a great on-camera presence. In this commercial, Halle was a news anchor reporting on the “breaking news” that Warrendale Appliance is having a crazy good sale, which she doesn’t even believe at first. Then,  when she realizes that the sale is real, she runs off of the set, mid-sentence, to get to Warrendale in Waltham, MA, for some new appliances. The idea was to parody the local news broadcasting genre and the reactionary nature of the modern 24-hour news cycle.

This was how the original ad appeared once we finished editing:

The Problem & The Solution

We were all set for the commercials to be broadcast when we were informed by Channel 5/HHearst Corporation that they would not be airing the commercials because they didn’t want to confuse their audience with a fabricated news ad – I’m going to interject here. When you are creating an advertisement, you always want to create as much excitement and surprise as possible. This was the reason that we wanted to do a breaking news story—to make the potential new customers of Warrendale Appliance of Waltham look. But, in the case of Channel 5, we realized the only way it was going to be seen was if we completely reworked the commercial. This meant we were battling with time because we had less than 24 hours to rework the whole commercial. We also had to make two 15-second versions along with the 30-second version. In addition, we needed a “tax-free” version of all three commercials previously mentioned. So, we quickly had to switch from a breaking news announcement to a morning talk show format. Perhaps it all makes more sense if you watch the original one above and the new “altered” version below.

Our editor, Kevin Bowers, got started with creating a completely new virtual set in our editing suite here at Sound and Vision Media. Since we shot all of the raw footage in our green screen studios, we were able to change out the background to anything that we wanted, in this case, going from a news background to a morning talk show background. This was a very interesting process, to say the least.

Virtual news studio set created in Blender 3D, featuring a modern news desk and large screens with “Breaking News” displays.

After: Monochrome virtual set for “Morning Talk! with Reese Wilson” created in Blender 3D, featuring a desk and blue curtains.

After: A wireframe view of a virtual set design in Blender 3D, featuring multiple light sources and a camera setup.

We managed to get a brand new commercial in one day! Here is the finished product of the talk show version:

Conclusion

So, what’s the moral of the story? In today’s media world, you’ve got to be flexible. In the end, our client, Warrendale Appliance, was very happy, and so was Channel 5 of Boston/Hearst Corporation. Hooray!