MAKING A WESTERN SPEC COMMERCIAL - How To successfully create a commercial

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This video is an in depth look into the making of a low-budget western style spec commercial that actually got sold.

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Skip to 6:50 to watch the full commercial!

What is a spec commercial is? It’s a video made to demonstrate the skill and creativity of the filmmakers, and not as paid work for the company advertised. Since I often speak about creativity and working with people in order to create projects, I thought it’d be interesting to make a video with a bunch of footage from the behind the scenes and share the experience with you guys. So, without further ado, here’s “The making of a spec commercial.”

Thanks to my friend Marty Hrjesa, which I met on another film set over ten years ago, we were able to procure ourselves a pretty cool western looking location in Acton, California. This place is owned by one of his close friends, and luckily for us, he has a couple of Western style buildings in his backyard. The buildings include a Sheriff’s office, complete with Jail cell, and a western bar. Now you may be wondering what kind of commercial we are doing. Even though it’s set in the far west we thought we could take some liberty and actually have the Cowgirl take out a phone. Probably from the images I’m showing you here you can pretty much figure out that it’s for a dating app. We decided to go for this dating app called Flip. It boasts itself as being a really amazing app because it avoids phishing scams by doing background checks on all people registering for it. Anyways, back to the commercial. By the way, this isn’t a paid advertisement. We legitimately filmed this commercial as a spec.

My good firend Juand David Castilla came all the way from New-York City in order to direct it. Luckily for me and my production partner Jonathan Cocco, with whom I’ve worked on a ton of films together, we were able to make all of our equipment available to him. Yeah, as you can tell from the film shoot and all the stuff on set, we hooked him up pretty well. We decided to shoot the commercial with 2 black magic cinema 6k Cameras. They are amazing cameras because they are pretty inexpensive at around $2500 but perform extremely well, even offering RAW and a multitude of advantages that only more expensive cameras such as the Red or Arri cameras offer.

For this commercial we decided that I would actually smoke cigars, and if you know me, you would know that I actually really despise smoking. I live an extremely clean and healthy lifestyle, but I must admit that smoking looks cool on camera, even though it literally tastes like garbage. I had to smoke a bunch of cigars on that day, and that was the first time I’ve ever had to do that and I actually kind of felt a little sick at the end of the day. Either way, it’s done and it was pretty darn cool looking on camera.
Since the location wasn’t the best looking and we decided to go with the whole Steadicam look, we had to get pretty creative with the camera angles, avoiding the phone poles, houses and cars around us.

Now for the showdown scene between the cowgirl and myself in the role of the villain, I had to do a ton of falls which was kinda fun. Having a background in stunts, doing falls is always a fun thing, especially that this one was actually pretty simple. Honestly the hardest part was lying on the floor after the actual stunt because it was super cold.

I also wanna give special props to actress Kate Surinskaya as she was able to pick-up all the gritty details of taking out her gun and killing me in a showdown. It seems simple to literally take out the gun and shoot, but when you are dealing with super cold weather, not having warm clothes on, numb finger, a holster that is more a prop than something used in a real showdown and still managing to take out the gun efficiently every take, well it takes skill.

Here in the jail scene and once again in the final bar scene we’re able to see actor Marty Hrjesa doing what he does best, acting. He’s theatre trained and we can tell. He is extremely intense in all he does and I just can’t take my eyes off his performance. Thank you for being a part of the team.

In the final bar scene we can also see the good looking cowboy. The guy that gets all the dates, Troy Hobbs. Seriously, thank you for driving out so far. I know that the role wasn’t the biggest but we couldn’t have done it without your charming smile.

As a token of my appreciation, I really want to take the time to thank

Juan David Castilla for directing this project.

Marshall Victory for his amazing DP work.

Daniel Sinclair, Javier Ortiz, Micah Goldfarb, Austin Berndt, Dane liberato for being such hard working crew members:.

Allie Shehorn for doing doing her make-up magic.

All the extras for coming to hang out with us.

Glend Duncan for letting us film on his western set.

Jonathan Cocco for co-producing this commercial.