Beaver Nation 30 Second Institutional Spot – 10 Favorite Things

My first blog post comes in the form of our brand new 30-second institutional spot. This is the commercial that will be played during sports broadcasts and ad buys for the Beavers. The team contributed to production of the commercial with collaboration from the OSU Marketing team.

I want to offer some of my favorite things about it, coming from a behind the scenes perspective.

This was produced in-house. Everything minus the color and audio mastering was shot by us, coordinated by us and directed by us. We are super proud of that.
This is not your typical university commercial. When we say institutional spot, we definitely don’t let that get us down. We set out with a specific vision to be more than the epic voiceover, crane shot kind of university commercial.
Our version of “epic voiceover” comes in the form of Dr. Cheldelin in 1965 where he reads part of the Oregon State creed to a new incoming class during his convocation speech.
And our version of the crane shot comes in the form of the hyperlapse. Those timelapses of Reser, the Memorial Union and Weatherford are kind of like a timelapse that move far distances.
Every single shot has a story. For example, Kegan and I spent an entire day on a research vessel out 5 miles from the coast to get a single shot that shows up at about 0:23 in the commercial that holds for less than a second. Needless to say, we did not get seasick but we did have delicious fish and chips.
Slow motion is awesome. We included several of our favorite slow-mo shots in this commercial. The Korean Dancers or the pouring hops are probably my favorite.
We leveraged existing footage. I would say a good portion (30-40%) was footage that we already had and could use. Our philosophy going in was to ask ourselves, “Can we get a better shot?” If the answer was “yes”, then we arranged a shoot. That said, we were able to essentially recycle what we had and that saved us a whole lot of time.
Distribution is a whole other ballgame. I thought when we were done, I’d just send the files over and magically the commercial would play on TV. Not that easy. TV networks are vast and distributing to broadcast systems is not just a copy paste operation.
We like to include people we work with in our work. At 0:24, we had an intern hop on a bike for us and at 0:27, you can barely make out Colin’s dad, who is a vet at the university.
We worked hard on this. Overall, I’d say we went through over 10 revisions and just as many different music choices. From conception to finish, we probably spent 3-4 months on this project while juggling dozens of other projects. Everyone put in so much to these 30 seconds; I can’t help but be proud of the work that we were able to produce and happy when I see it on TV.

If you liked our 30-second spot, I’d encourage you to check out the Beaver Nation website where you can view our 1 minute spot, which is completely different in feel with new voiceover and great animated elements.

-Darryl

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