Guest Post from Alex Hanawalt, “The Briefcase Syndicate”
Thursday, April 20th, 2006
Firefox is a fun product to try to find a way to market, especially for storytellers. There’s something emotionally satisfying thinking about why Firefox succeeds. It has more to do with the David and Goliath dynamic. It’s about where Firefox comes from. It’s about the community that cares about, develops, and administers support for the browser. The kind of devotion Firefox receives can never be matched by the traditional structured environments that other similar software comes from - and that’s it. It’s the spirit of the whole enterprise that makes Firefox a formidable threat to a giant like Microsoft. Firefox is more clever, nimble, and useful than other browsers, and can always stay so because of where it comes from. It’s democratizing technology and the web - which is exactly the dream a lot of people once had about the web 20 years ago.
I decided to take this idea of Firefox, and what we all know about its power, and with a bit of an homage to Syriana, depict how fearful the competition should perhaps be. In my commercial, we see two “suits” walking down a street, one defensively demanding of the other, “What is this community that’s supposed to be going around, spreading the word?” While they walk, we see quick cuts of activity all over the continent - young, hip individuals handing a briefcase off in various locations. What the briefcase contains we only find out in the end, when the “good suit” informs the other that now people have a choice.
I borrowed an HDV camera from a production company and shot footage down in Ensenada, Mexico, then traveled up to San Francisco, then used an office location in Palo Alto, then returned to LA to shoot on roofs of buildings and then our main walking and talking scene right in the heart of downtown. We were lucky to be shooting right around the corner from a real BIG commercial shoot, so people made way for us as we spent the morning walking up and down our stretch of street shooting various takes - everyone thought we were part of the big permitted shoot!
I edited the project and spent a week tweaking the few motion graphics shots to get them to look believable. I brought the actors back in for ADR, which is really nice for commercials because you get so much more clarity from the actor’s voices. I spent several days color correcting using a bunch of different tools including the marvelous miracle-working Color Finesse in After Effects, as well as Magic Bullet. I did this work in DV50 color space to preserve more detail than normal DV allows for. Finally, I cropped the image to a 4:3 aspect ratio and mixed in the music from my longtime composer and friend, Andy Hentz, using Pro Tools, and shipped the finished spot off just in time for the deadline!
It was a lot of fun, I’m enjoying seeing the different ideas people have come up with, and I wish everyone the best of luck!
Alex Hanawalt
Director: “The Briefcase Syndicate”
