Working on corporate videos is a much different animal than working on entertainment. That seems obvious, but I have been surprised at how different an animal it is.
My company’s largest client is a pharmaceutical company called Pfizer, best know as the manufacturer for Viagra. Allied Pixel does a lot of different projects for this company, but once a financial quarter, they do a talking head piece for their salespeople to explain new sales information about their different products.
This is the shoot I was on for my first shoot. Pfizer, with a large complex in Collegeville, PA, has a studio decked out with a huge, curved green screen wall. We set up lights and flags to get the green screen exposure just right. My primary job is as a stand in. I joke that I was Seth Rogen’s stand in, but then he decided not to be fat.
The day (actually, multiple days, because we left the set up and used it for four days over two weeks) is a parade of executives in charge of a rheumatoid arthritis drug called EMBREL. We film them in front of a green screen as they read the information off a teleprompter.
The script is written by an outside advertising company from New York, and they bring in their own director, who I believe is freelance, because he doesn’t seem like part of the close knit group of ad execs watching the filming. Allied Pixel is only providing the crew.
It’s interesting to see the difference in directing this sort of project compared to directing fiction pieces. While it’s still about the talent’s performance, it’s more about just trying to get regular people to not sound like regular people not used to being in front of a camera. It’s also interesting to see the ad executives acting as producers, worried about whether the phrasing perfectly reflects the message they want to send about their project. I guess there is an art to filming non-art.