How I Shot A Commercial With ZERO Budget: Start-To-Finish Breakdown!

Creating spec ads is a great way to build up your portfolio, practice filmmaking skills, and to keep working during slower times as a video creator. But it can also be difficult since you often have limited time, limited crew, and little to no budget! In this video, I'll break down, in detail, how I made a spec commercial for a donut shop with no budget and just a few friends!

Thanks to Track Club for sponsoring this video.

Table of Contents:
0:00 - How Did We Get Here?
0:34 - Donut Shop Spec Ad
1:30 - The Planning
3:41 - Shooting (Equipment, Technique, and More)
5:57 - Editing: Music Sets The Pace
9:43 - Editing: Assembling The Pieces
12:37 - Color Grading
17:55 - Audio: The Voiceover
19:54 - Audio: Sound Design
24:12 - Audio: Mixing
24:39 - Hindsight: What Would I Do Differently

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[ajcproductions]

The breakdown of the isolated sound design was absolutely incredible!

[gingersnaps]

This is the most comprehensive and easy to understand tutorial I’ve seen on YouTube.
Thanks for all the effort you put in!
I’m definitely going to play around with the voice AI tools.
Great result!

[danielbarakat]

YouTube is recommended me a whole bunch of your videos now and I'm happy about that. Commercial was epic. There's a lot that I took for granted until you broke it down. Crazy how much work and thought goes into a 30 second commercial.

[Gaffx]

Amazing!
With this type of content you can create a better world!

we need more content on the internet with the workflows on how to do things

[jbento.visuals]

Well done! Gonna try something like this. It’s always great to see how simple productions can generate amazing results. Great job! 👍

[wearetrackclub]

Seeing how the music, editing, color grade, and sound design all comes together is so cool! Results turned out great, as always, Dunna! 👏

[DstickSpearfishing]

This was freaking cool. Thanks so much for the break down, learnt heaps, esp the isolated sound design, Audio and how you did the composition, Amazing! Cheers for helping others! Stay safe, have fun! 👊✋✌👍🙏

[AmaraBenjamin]

Ah! spec commercials are so fun and this was a brilliant! Hope you’ll make more from time to time!

[CamCitizenTV]

Really awesome ad, but mainly I love how you went through the whole process! I love editing my videos to music and let it set the pace.

[EdwardKilner]

Just learning Resolve, so this was a sort of mini course in filmmaking. Definitely showed me I don’t know much about the craft. Zero budget - still chuckling over that one, given the huge time and effort you put into the post production. Wasn’t planning on watching the whole video, figured it was too long for the end result, but I did watch it in the end. Thanks for your effort.

[MVREMD]

Dunna Did It, one of the new breeds of YouTubers you can trust

[WanderingYooper]

Outstanding video, thanks for breaking it all down.

[garelbidi]

Well done Donnut !!!! Awesome work !!! Very fun !!

[thefilmalliance]

Awesome quality commercial. Genius and funny 🔥 love how simple you kept it. And on a zero budget can’t beat it

[JerseyLeft]

Why you don't have more views on this I'll never understand. You shared the hidden nuggets of your experience, like how you had to manipulate the eleven labs AI to add a sad tone to the voice by including it in the lines it generated. fantastic.

[alvinantonio]

Awesome video. I have done a project like this before and this video shows exactly all the work that goes into it. It takes days, weeks and sometimes months to get it to a point where you feel like you can hit that publish button. It's a ton of work and yet you made it look effortless.

[joshgaffney]

The versatility that Davinci provides for color grading is outstanding. I need to hop over

[AlexBjorstorp]

Thank you Dunna! I didn't plan to do a spec AD but now I do! I absolutely loved the breakdowns and you walking us through every step! Time to go shoot!

[ivanmedia]

Audio is so importsnt it gives the whole vibe nice work!

[BeckiandChris]

Well thanks, now I want an Apple fritter 😂 This was so fun, the ad turned out great!