i have always been a fan of big, bold colorful sets. in film school it seemed like an easy trick to try and have a bunch of complimentary colors littering the frame to make it appear “designed”. but, those sets never felt like they supported the story, and got complicated to execute on tiny budgets. as i started to get more commercial work, this idea became more affordable to pull off and so the monochrome journey began.
with the first few monochromatic commercials, it was really just about identifying one of the brands core colors, and using that as the backdrop. this was a relatively cheap way to make something appear polished, without the budget blowing up. that’s where things started with Dubble Bubble and MTV. we simply used solid, bold colored backdrops, and put the characters in front of them with some soft light. MTV at least has a few additional props that are the same color, but the backdrop in each spot is doing most of the work.
as time moved on, i did my first bigger monochromatic set for Panera Bread and the agency Anomaly out of New York. Panera Bread has a pretty active community on social media, and the creatives were looking for a way to re-imagine funny tweets that fans of Panera wrote. cut to: Panera Tweet Theatre. production designer Joshua Peterson created our monochromatic theatre, and we had several props brought in that were all matching Panera green, or white, for pops of accent color. using this color scheme, we created five spots, all shot by Brooks Ludwick.
next up, we took it a bit further with HP. they wanted to display some features on their new printing app, and thought the monochromatic look was the way to do it. we really embraced the HP blue, and had everything powder coated to be the same color. even the wardrobe was in the same palette of blue. only a few pieces of paper, and devices are white in the spot. the goal was to have everything be stylized and interesting to look at, but fall away and allow you to focus on the functionality of the HP App and their printer. Tyler Jensen served as production designer on this spot, and brought a few great touches by adding some accents to the walls, and hand building the tile floor.
the most recent set was red for State Farm. this campaign was a bit more complicated because the client wanted there to be “no shadows” and have elements appear to be floating. the campaign was designed to be bold and feel like a MEME. Tim Miller took the reins as production designer and constructed many elements out of the State Farm red, and then had an entire 150 foot cyc stage painted the same color. The end result in the spot looked very minimal and simple, but behind the scenes, there was quite a bit of rigging going on. to perfectly match the title cards at the end of the spot, DP Brooks Ludwick had to light things as smooth as possible, then an on set DIT was live grading to constantly match colors and pull out shadows.
so that’s it so far. i am definitely a fan of this look and curious to see how far we can continue to push this style. maybe i’ll do something with some transforming monochromatic worlds, or sets that slide in and out on a track. who knows! but i have definitely had a blast this far. check out all the spots in the commercials tab.