Today we are taking an idea from a listener and breaking down a recent project. We’ll get into the good, the bad, and the lunch recommendation.

Before listening, please watch our spot “It’s time for Slingshot.”

In this episode, we’ll unpack:

• Who the client is and what they came to us for
• What our strategy was
• How we came up with the project creative
• Wins and challenges across pre-production, production, and post

Like this episode? Hated it? It’s your last chance to complete our podcast survey! Let us know what you think about the show and enter for a chance to win either an Amazon gift card or a donation to your local food bank.

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Transcript

Guy Bauer: A big part of this is human psychology. It's not even the strength of the idea that gets something through. Like, maintain confidence throughout the entire thing, and then that's what will give people confidence to post it.

Hope Morley: Hello and welcome to Death to the Corporate Video, a podcast with tools and advice for how to make B2B video ads your prospects actually want to watch. I'm Hope Morley.

Guy Bauer: I'm Guy Bauer.

Hope Morley: Hi Guy. The idea for today's show actually came from our listener survey. So thank you so much to everyone who completed the survey. It really gave us a lot to think about as we plan our content for 2023.

And I'm gonna link the survey one last time in the show notes today. Before the next episode, I will choose the winner of the gift card or the donation to the food bank. So one last chance to fill it. Get in there for that drawing. Let us know if you want a $50 Amazon card or a $50 donation to your local food bank. And tell us what you think about the show. 

So this episode came from some listener feedback that people asked for a behind the scenes look at some of our projects. So we are going to be doing a deep dive into a recent project that we did, for a company called Slingshot Biosciences. I'm linking the video in the show notes.

So if you haven't seen our “It's time for Slingshot” spot. We just dropped it on LinkedIn, about a week ago. If you haven't seen it yet, please pause this episode. Take a minute, go watch that, because we're gonna be talking about it for pretty much the whole episode. So take the 60 seconds to watch that and then come back and join us. We’ll wait.

Guy Bauer: We will wait in real time.

Hope Morley: Yeah, so here's 60 seconds of dead air. I'll put a little hold music, elevator jams…

Guy Bauer: And welcome back. What did you think? Cool, right?

Hope Morley: All right, so let's talk about how this spot came to be. We're really proud of it. We're really excited to share it with all of you. It's our favorite project that we've released so far in 2023. It is also our only project that we've released so far in 2023. But let's start with the high level. Who is Slingshot Biosciences and what did they ask for?

Guy Bauer: Oh yeah, that's good. So Slingshot makes a product called Slingshot. Get ready. Hold on, hold on tight to this. Okay, so in the field of like biopharma there's a method called flow cytometry. 

And basically they beam light at individual cells. Like individual cells get excited by a laser. And then, what you can do is kind of read what happens to the laser light. Does it scatter in a certain way? These flow cytometers read the data from every single cell that passes through this funnel. And then plots each cell and based on what color the cell emits when it's hit by the laser or whatever number of factors, that's how you can tell like what this cell is, is this a disease cell, is this a normal cell? Whatever the problem is is just like with all chemistry experiments, if you think back to high school is when you do an experiment.

Hope Morley: And not just chemistry, but any research, biological research.

Guy Bauer: You're always supposed to have a control. You're always supposed to have something to compare your results to. The problem in flow cytometry is like if you're testing for some rare cancer, to have a control of this rare cancer is kind of hard to find because you need actual, real people to have that rare cancer, and then you have to have enough of their cells and, and store them and like subzero stuff and procure them.

So it gets very complicated and expensive and just cumbersome. So what Slingshot does is they make artificial controls. What they'll do is they, using a very proprietary 3D printing technique, They will take, like, say, a cancer cell, and then reverse engineer in a synthetic cell to give off those exact same readings. They're beads of little, tiny, microscopic plastic. It's amazing that they can do this. But you know, you don't need to have the crazy refrigeration 

they're not super expensive. And so it's synthetic controls for flow cytometry. I hope that was clear.

Hope Morley: Yeah, so you can see listeners that this is a very complicated product, very technical, and if you paused and watched the spot as we hope that you did, we didn't say any of that necessarily in this spot. But the very first step in the strategy and the creative for coming up with the idea for this client was that we had to understand that. Guy had to do a deep dive of YouTube, of what is flow cytometry, how, what is the problem that these bench scientists are experiencing?

What are these researchers? What's the problem? What's the current situation and how does Slingshot fix this problem? Because if you don't understand that, you can't come up with creative idea.

Guy Bauer: Yeah, this is taken from legendary copywriter, George Tenenbaum. He told me once the best opera singers speak Italian because without the basis of understanding Italian, how the heck can you sing it properly? Like you're not gonna put the right emphasis, the right words and syllables and so on.

So part of like the very first step was to literally just understand what the heck flow cytometry is and not at some like superficial level, but not to say that I'm now an expert in flow cytometry, but I was able to hold my own in a conversation with the client, you know, and, and talk about little nuanced things.

What's interesting is, is so I was coming in and from zero knowledge, so you have to get up to speed. You may be, dear listener, you may work in a company so you don't need to get up to speed. but it's important to do that level of research is like, so even if you knew what flow cytometry is and you're doing an ad for Slingshot or something, you should still see what else is out there online and how other people are talking about it, because it all does add up into insight and it gets you out of your like little echo chamber that you're in.

David C. Baker always says, it's like the power of the outsider is that the outsider? It's very easy. Like if you are, you work at a company, you're in a jar and there's a label on the outside, but since you're in the jar, you can't read the label. Where an outsider just comes in and picks up the jar and sees your label, it's easier.

So you wanna always have that outside perspective of like, yeah, let me just like go back to zero. Let's just like talk about like, why does anyone need controls in the first place. And that was kind of what I had to like, why do you need this?

Hope Morley: Mm-hmm.

Guy Bauer: Because if you don't understand why it exists, and you just start diving into like, well, let's just tell them about our controls and how synthetic and great they are, but like, why?

Why does anyone need this? You have to answer that question. And even if you work at a company. I would definitely take a step back and, and just answer that question, like, why does anyone need this? Just tell me, explain to me like I'm, what's that thread on Reddit? Explain it to me like I'm five. Yeah.

Hope Morley: Mm-hmm. Yeah, so what the client came to us for was they had a potential opportunity to run commercials on Hulu. So this was supposed to be a television commercial. So we really wanted something that was engaging high quality and that would work well in the medium of streaming tv. Part of our strategy for this is that thinking about that audience, it was gonna be potentially on the big screen.

So we really wanted something that could hold its own with broadcast TV commercials.

Guy Bauer: Mm-hmm. Yes. It's really hard to talk about our own work like this.

Hope Morley: We can't read the label on our own jar either.

Guy Bauer: It's like so weird. It's like, to me, this is the most uninteresting thing. But, a few listeners said this exact note is like, break it down. So we're breaking it down for you. 

Hope Morley: You like or don't like this episode, after you listen to it, follow that link in the show notes to the survey and let us know.

Guy Bauer: Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, so once we figured out what flow cytometry was and why you would even need controls, what we found was actually the insight and, and the, actually the idea flowed from this.

Hope Morley: Was that a flow cytometry pun?

Guy Bauer: It is. But basically from our conversation with our client. As we dug in, we realized that well actually scientists are going without controls a lot and kind of just trial and erroring, because there are no controls because it's just not practical for a lot of these diseases in a lot of research.

So they'll just go without, and a lot of their time is wasted because the experiments are not reproducible. It led us very easily to Oh, so you're kind of winging it. You're winging it. You're like, you need luck. 

And actually, I think we said that to the client. They were like, yeah, that's exactly, I think our, our client was even like, it's kind of scary, you know, commoners or, not commoners, but us civilians lay people, it's a little scary to us. Yeah. You know what I mean? It's like, wait. Huh? You wait. You just wing it. What?

Hope Morley: People doing medical research are just winging it sometimes. Yeah.

Guy Bauer: Yeah, she was like, yeah, it's scary. So it's, it's kind of like, and I remember asking this question, I was like, well, why doesn't this exist? And she was like, because it literally couldn't have existed until the technology came around where you can 3D print like little microscopic things, you can't even see them. They're invisible. You know what I mean? They're just suspended in water or some liquid, I mean, they're invisible to you.

They're the size of cells, yeah. To the naked eye. So the technology just didn't exist. You couldn't 3D print that small. Up until like recently. And what's crazy is you can't come up with that insight unless you do that pre-work.

And that was 90% of our work was just the pre-work. And I'm telling you, and that's the power that we have as outsiders because we're like, wait a second, this is so obvious. Like, it's so obvious the solve here. But when you're in it day to day, it's just very hard because you know, you know too much inside baseball.

So if you work at a company, at a brand and you don't want to use Umault, or some kind of outside agency, you have to do legwork. To get out, try to get out of that jar. And the best way to do it is kind of like start from zero. Just like, all right, just answer me this. Why do we exist? Like, why do you need this?

Truthfully, not like the corporate line of like, we're like none of that stuff. Like just tell me in real, like just straight up language. Why do we exist? And a lot of times that's where the ideas come from. They really do.

Hope Morley: Yeah, so let's talk about our brainstorming process. Speaking of where ideas come from. So we did this deep, deep dive. We worked with the client to understand their product and the customer's problem, and then we went off to our little hobbit hole to do our brainstorming.

Guy Bauer: Yeah, so what we do is we brainstorm as a team. Everyone has to come up with, I like, usually we say, just come up with 10 to 20 ideas. And our whole thing is like, just come up with any idea. Even if you think it's bad, just write it down. It's not about quality of ideas early on, it's about just quantity.

And what you'll notice when you just start. Writing down every single bad idea you have is you start noticing almost like how your brain works, is your brain like, starts with a little synapse over here and then a little one over here, and they're very different. You know what I mean? But then as you keep writing ideas, they start connecting.

And then eventually an idea is born, but it's only born out of work. A lot of people think that there's some magic thing that we have. I don't know if a lot of people think that, but I don't know. A few. A few. But it's not magic. It's literally just, it's work. It's just work. You just have to come up with a lot of ideas and then we get together as a group and what do we do, Hope?

Hope Morley: Everyone shares their ideas. And no matter how good or how bad you hear people premising them and it's like, oh, this isn't really fully formed. But the advantage of doing it in a group and even sharing things that aren't fully formed or that you don't think are good is that you can build on each other and there's a lot of power in that building.

So this idea for Slingshot, kind of came out of two half ideas that Guy and I each had that were combined into this final one. So together in through the brainstorming process, a complete creative idea was formed.

Guy Bauer: Yeah, I came with like the things that they were saying, like what could go wrong and then Hope was like, oh, we should have them have good luck charms. But what's interesting is both of us were rooted in like good luck or not being in control, like just kind of winging it.

Hope Morley: Like leaving it up to the fates.

Guy Bauer: Right, right. And it was only through the act of sharing where those two were connected with each other.

Because that's the thing, like if you just tell your team, well just come up with 10 ideas and send 'em to me in an email, also, the bad way to do it is people come with nothing and then like everyone just sits around at a table and like, all right, what do you got? That's to me the worst brainstorm.

Hope Morley: Yeah. You know, brainstorming sessions need, you need to be prepared. People have to come with stuff, and then you can work through it. The brainstorming session should not be the first time that people hear about the project for one. It should not be the first time that anybody is thinking about these ideas.

Guy Bauer: Yeah. And I'm telling you, the best thing that we do is, and this is the secret, as the, as the, the youth say. Hope, this is the sauce right here. I'm gonna give you the sauce, and I've said it before, but the secret creative weapon you have is sleeping on it. It is like you, you do a little work and then you sleep on it.

You do a little bit more work and you sleep on it. You know, how do you eat an elephant? You eat it one bite at a time. Like, don't try to just do this. All at once. That's the way I used to work. Like every time someone would say, break it up in a small, I'd be like, whatever, we'll just do it the day before.

I'm telling you as a 41 year old, I can vouch that that does not work. It just does not work. Like you need subconscious time, like your subconscious needs to chew on it and even John Cleese just wrote a book, I forget what it's called. I have it. It takes you like 20 minutes to read it, but he even talked, that's how Monty Python did it.

They would just do a little bit and then just let their subconscious chew on it. And that's why I think ideas come out in showers, on walks and stuff. Because that's kind of like when you let go of your active thinking, you know, and your subconscious comes out.

Hope Morley: You're not distracted. You go into kind of autopilot mode when you're chopping a salad for dinner or you're taking a shower. You're not like, you don't have to be focusing on what you're doing so that you can just think.

Guy Bauer: Yeah. I feel like ideas just come pouring out of me in those scenarios. Like walking and showering particularly are like, but what's funny is like, but that's not where the work is. The work is during nine to five, having meetings that sometimes can be tedious or like you feel like are a waste or like, why couldn't this have been an email?

But it's, that's where you input, like, that's where all the stuff gets into your brain, and then you have to then give your subconscious time to chew on it. And I'm telling you like good ideas. You know, like I think my skill as the creative director is my skill is identifying and shaping ideas. Like identifying a good one, but I don't have a good idea factory that's any more gooder than anyone else.

You know what I'm saying? Like good ideas can come from anywhere. And the more time you give your team to leverage their subconscious, you know, and, and, and that's why also it's, it's important to have frequent pulses too, to like kind of bring it back to everyone's prefrontal cortex. So you can't just go like, all right, I'll see you in a month.

Like they're, people aren't gonna like, you know, chew on it every day. So like, have like little every other day or every three day pulses and keep it like front and center in people's brain. I'm telling you, it works.

Hope Morley: Yeah. So we came up with this idea and it became formed into the lucky charms with the scientists saying things like, what could go wrong? Let's see what happens. And then we put the dramatic NFL films voiceover with that to kind of give it a little bit more gravitas. 

Guy Bauer: It's silly. 

Hope Morley: It sounds so silly

Guy Bauer: Yeah, it's silly.

Hope Morley: But it's fun. Something that we wanted to talk about with this idea because as you heard at the top of the episode, this is a very complicated product and industry. And complicated ad ideas tend to be completely impossible to shoot. You know, you need to have a good, clear, universal theme that the actors can understand that people, the ideal needs to be easily understood by everyone making the thing in order to make it.

Guy Bauer: So here's a good test. If your idea is understandable by people that are not in your industry, then it's a good idea. When I knew this was good and we were like, okay, yeah, this is like totally good. Is that the actors, when they got their scripts, they were like, oh, this is hilarious.

This is fun. Yeah, this is awesome. Because what that means is, we distilled something complicated. Biomarker controls for flow cytometry into a universal theme. Stop winging it or don't rely on luck. That conversion to a universal theme, and I'm telling you people, when they're online and watching TV, they're not gonna respond to some super technical thing they're gonna respond to something that's very level one thinking, some kind of universal theme. Honestly, I can identify if a thing is a winner or a loser when I just explain the idea to my friends or people I play basketball with. Like, if they can just understand the idea and go, huh, yeah, that's good.

Like that. I, I know I know it's good, but if they go like, oh, uh, you know, if there's any like, yeah. Okay. Um, in fact, that's a really good, uh, on our check we have like a creative checklist. But it's like, would you be embarrassed telling this?

Like at a dinner party, like, or like, would you tell this idea at a dinner party? And that's like a good question to ask yourself. You know, we also have a thing, is it pizza? But a lot of times there's a rush to make something once you have what you think is a good idea. And there are sometimes where ideas are good, but they're just not ready for prime time or they're not fleshed out enough or, or like they're good on paper but not good in real life.

And a lot of times, People get that feeling of like, good, it's done. Let's make this thing. But it's like, well, is it really good though? Is it good enough that you would actually show this, you know, in or like tell this idea to friends and be proud of it. So like, make sure you make your ideas, earn their spot.

Like they have to stand on their own themselves and Yeah. And so like, when. When the talent was like, oh, this is funny. Yeah, I get it. Yeah, totally. And like they came to set, they didn't have to know about flow cytometry, but all of them knew exactly like how to play it. And that's the sign that the idea is cutting through that.

It's like getting to a really good level. And I'll tell you what, not only does your talent understand if you get a good idea that has some kind of universal theme, but then your crew does too. So production, I don't wanna say it was a breeze, no. Production day is a breeze, but it was not chaotic, it was not problem filled.

You know, we had to solve problems and you know.

Hope Morley: You always do.

Guy Bauer: Nobody was confused on, wait. I thought they go, you know, like, why are they happy here? Like, nope, everyone knew the emotions. That's why like you have to get to that layer of simplicity and then everything else starts clicking.

If it's too complicated, if it's just too many things going on.

Hope Morley: Then people wouldn't understand. 

Guy Bauer: Yeah, odd’s are it’s not gonna cut through.

Hope Morley: And of course we do a very detailed treatment. Once we script and storyboard. Then it really breaks down every scene and every moment for the cast and crew to understand what's happening throughout the entire spot. So we do break that all down for them, but it has to be easy for them to understand. 

Guy Bauer: So I directed Slingshot and I subscribe to this mantra, fix it in pre, so fix it in pre-production. So on Slingshot, it's not like things were against us or anything like actually, I would say that we got pretty lucky with the location. 

Hope Morley: Yeah, it's a real flow cytometry lab.

Guy Bauer: Yeah, it's a real flow cytometry lab.

But a lot of times, like I just got back from a project in Austin where our location, we were moving so fast that we didn't really get to scout or anything. Like in real life. We had to scout all digitally, and oh my gosh, this location gave me a ton of problems.

Usually our scouts are like an hour, hour and a half, two max. This was like a five hour scout because there were so many at every turn. This location was like trying to screw me. I mean, not the people, the owners were fine. I'm just saying like the way the house was faced, you know what I mean, so many things were wrong.

When you see the spot, it's, you can't tell any of that stuff because you fixed it beforehand. And this is the same thing. It's like the idea has to be good before you shoot it, and then before you shoot. We always do like a pretty in-depth treatment and that treatment should be your shot list. The storyboard.

What are the colors you're trying to go for with wardrobe? What's your schedule? A lot of times it's just schedule. Where's the sun gonna be at a certain time during the day? I mean, there's like so many questions. What you don't want is your shoot day to be you figuring out things that you should have figured out a week before. Because what's gonna happen is, is those things are gonna get you, and then the things that you didn't know were gonna happen were also happened to you. So on any given shoot day, there's always a problem. There's always like probably six things that come up on average that suck, whereas they call it in the our business not ideal.

That's like everyone always says, uh, that's not ideal. There's six things that suck, that go wrong. But what's worse? Six things that go wrong, or six plus 20 things that you haven't made a decision on. So that's 26 items, and that's where when I was younger, I wouldn't do those 20 items before the shoot.

I would keep it all for shoot day decisions and now I'm dealing with 26 less than ideal things. And what do you think that results in? It results in less than ideal work.

Hope Morley: Less than ideal work.

Guy Bauer: Yeah, exactly. So like fix all those things. Like you should not be losing any sleep the day before a shoot because you have unresolved things.

Everything needs to be put to bed. Everything. If there is a question or a doubt, you must raise that doubt. When I was younger, I used to want to bury the doubt, right, and be, well, it's not a big, I'm sure it'll work out. I'm sure it'll be fun.

Hope Morley: What could go wrong 

Guy Bauer: Yeah. What could go wrong? 

Hope Morley: Slingshot?

Guy Bauer: No. It does go wrong.

That's the thing. It does go wrong. So, you know, again, like our things went wrong on Slingshot. Like, I'm trying to think of what, what went wrong on that day? Like what was a less than ideal moment? What happened? There was like a sign, I remember that.

Hope Morley: Yeah, we had to take down some like sign because it was a real working lab. So there was some signs and dirty areas.

Guy Bauer: Oh, they told us that a person, a scientist, wanted to use a machine that we were shooting next to, so we had to, like kind of rearrange our shoot day a little bit.

Hope Morley: It was a holiday, but they still had students in the lab. Because a lot of this research they have to come in like every day. So, we had to work around some people who were actively working in the lab, but yeah, nothing major. I wanna touch on, you mentioned in, talking about treatment, you talked about things like color and one of the distinctive things that people who watched the Slingshot spot will see is the color treatment throughout.

It's not, like white and blue, sterile light. It's not really bright commercial lighting. So let's talk about that decision. Where did that come from?

Guy Bauer: I wish I could say some genius thing, but, honestly, Pinterest. So what I'll do is, type in like chemistry lab into Pinterest. And I found a lot of stuff that's like just very blue scientific or like white light, like clean white light. But then there was, and this is the cool thing about Pinterest, and I'm like, I only use Pinterest for this stuff. 

Hope Morley: Don't hate on Pinterest. Pinterest is like such an underdog of the social media world. 

Guy Bauer: oh, it's great.

Hope Morley: It is great.

Guy Bauer: I love it. I also love the more ideas button, because once you like feed the computer something, now that's where it got, so basically what you do is you make a board with, and just let Pinterest put stuff in your, in front of you.

It's pretty easy and you just save it to your board. And then, once you have like 20 things in there, just hit more ideas, and it just gives you more ideas. Pretty easy. And that's where the color treatment came from because I started looking at like other labs and like other ways that people have done it.

And also it's just more fun, right? Like it's a funny thing. Why shouldn't it have colors? The other thing, here's the other thing is that we were using one lab. 

Hope Morley: Mm. 

Guy Bauer: It was supposed to kind of feel like different labs, yeah. The practical reason why they're all different colors is that we're trying to get separation. Like we're trying to make, this guy was in the pink and purple universe. This woman was in teal and orange. So like through the color separation, we're cheating that it's different labs because this lab had very, like, it was white walls and then like purple columns, and it's so if we used bright white light or any colors that like could read, you would just, it would just feel like the same exact lab.

Maybe it does feel like the same lab. That's the other thing. I don't know. Because I'm too close to it. But leave a comment. Does it feel like the same lab did the colors, you know, but that was, there was the practical reason is separation to make them look like different labs.

Hope Morley: Mm-hmm. And it's pretty.

Guy Bauer: And it's pretty, I mean, come on. That's the other thing is like, you know what's so funny is like, I don't know where this came from, but a lot of times clients will be like, I don't know, is this real? They don't really do that. They would have a 10 step process before they do that. And I don't know where this urge came from to be like absolutely real all the time, because like in a 30 second or 60 second spot, like there's no way you can be real.

And if you're gonna be real, then it starts feeling stale and corporate.

Hope Morley: And you, if you think about something like a medical TV show, like do you think they follow the exact real procedures to do every medical procedure when you're watching that? One of those shows. No, absolutely not. Like they have to, they fictionalize it and they do it in a way that looks nice and that works for time and that works for the plot.

And nobody seriously is getting mad at these medical shows because, you know, they skip a step in doing some medical procedure. It doesn't matter.

Guy Bauer: Yeah, it's entertainment, like if you're submitting a video to the FDA yes, you should be real. It has to be. But if it's to entertain or to get brand awareness, make it as pretty as possible. What are you doing? Make it look good. This is gonna be a deep cut.

This is gonna reveal my nerdiness. If you watch the behind the scenes on the original Top Gun, on the original Top Gun, they had these like advisors, you know, like pilots, navy pilots that were like, We don't do that. Like, you know how in Top Gun, like they take off the ship and then they like spin upside down?

Their pilot advisor is like, why would you do that? There's no reason to do that. Like, we would never do that and the directors and the filmmakers have to keep saying like, but the person in Kansas watching this doesn't care. Like it's just entertainment. I understand they wouldn't do that, but it looks cool.

Like that's you, you have to think about that as like, I get it. Like no one does that, but like you're not being held to some kind of like legal standard. You know what I mean? Like make it look good, go upside down after you take off whatever the equivalent of that to your industry, like, I'm so happy for, I'm so glad Slingshot's our client because like yeah, they let us get a little kooky with the colors because would a real lab ever be like purple and pink and green and all these?

No. There's no way You have to have like clean light, I'm sure. But they were like, yeah, do it. It looks cool. 

Hope Morley: And it helps them stand out. You know, like we were talking about every other, every other pharmaceutical research kind of based spot all looks the same. So if you wanna be memorable, it's the easy way to stand out too.

Guy Bauer: Yep.

Hope Morley: Any other thoughts on production?

Guy Bauer: We had the ultimate shoot meal. Mediterranean. Here's a tip, you want a good meal? For your shoot days, Mediterranean, you cannot go wrong. It's perfect. It's good for the vegetarians and the vegans, like Hope. It's very proteiny. It's got carbs, but not, it's not like a pizza.

Like pizza's the worst, never get pizza. But it's not like sandwiches where it's like heavy, like you got pita, but the pita is like, you know what I mean? It's thin. It's not a big, it's just the perfect thing. And hummus. Hummus is protein.

Hope Morley: Protein, healthy fats. Yeah,

Guy Bauer: Yeah, it  really is. 

Hope Morley: Everything the body needs for the rest of your shoot day.

Guy Bauer: It really is. And then if you get some baklava, you know, sometimes they do that.

They didn't do that on the Slingshot thing, I don't think I saw baklava. That's an ancient dessert. Did you know that, Hope?

Hope Morley: I do like it though.

Guy Bauer: Okay.

Hope Morley: All right, so that's the final tip on production. So, the way that we do our projects, because we do so much pre-work, and everything is planned out in advance. The editing and the post-production process is pretty easy. You know, it becomes kind of, you know, putting the pieces of the puzzle together. But that's not where typically a whole lot of big decisions get made for us.

Guy Bauer: No, in fact this spot was even pre-edited. So I did like a little rough cut with my family. I think Jen or Jen, my wife, had to do, played every character and so I did a pre-edit, so even had all the music sound effects, everything actually, the sound effect. Here's a fun fact. The sound effect of the hand knocking on wood is from that sound effect of the, that is from the sample video I did that was shot on the iPhone, so that sound effect was shot on the iPhone.

Hope Morley: Hmm. Apple. If you wanna sponsor this show,

Guy Bauer: Yeah.

Hope Morley: give us a call.

Guy Bauer: But yeah, usually post is kind of paint by numbers. But what it does is, again, when you make your decisions early on, later on, your decisions are more fun. So, for example, if we had not done the pre-edit or the storyboard, we wouldn't really know how everything fits and we would in post. Now you discover problems because you're like, oh, I didn't think about that. Oh yeah. It cuts from her to her and they're looking the same direction. It kind of looks like they're like looking off and that doesn't make sense. Like all those problems get worked out when you do it beforehand. So now in post, you're still putting energy into post, but you know what you're doing is instead of like trying to get puzzle pieces fit together. You're just finding the best performance. You're watching every frame and going like, oh, that's the best time. They, you know, did the, like, you're not having to like, oh crap, none of this works. Now you're more like, you're using the same amount of time, but now your time is like, let me find those golden moments where, you know, like maybe we didn't even intend for that to be a golden moment.

That's what you get from doing all that work upfront. So again, the night before a shoot, there should be no questions in your mind. You should sleep easy. I used to not be able to sleep the night before a shoot. I used to not be able to sleep because there were so many things swirling around in my head of like unresolved things. Now I sleep soundly because everything, every little thing, including the actual end product, has been already done. So, yeah, so post was a breeze.

Hope Morley: Yeah. And then just to wrap this up, we'll talk about the final client reaction. So we love the spot, the client loves the spot. We got great feedback from the client. Again, because everything has been laid out for them through the treatment and everything. They don't have a lot of surprises when they get to post.

It's what they expected. Obviously they had some notes, but that's what clients do. And when they released it, they've gotten a really great reaction so far on LinkedIn as their main channel. And they've gotten tons of comments, likes, reposts. It’s getting really great engagement. So we haven't gotten any data yet on how it's performing for paid, but it seems to be doing really well for them organically.

Guy Bauer: Yeah, I think they've gotten like over 200 new followers. Not that I'm checking.

Hope Morley: Not that we're checking.

Guy Bauer: And I think it is their highest, best performing YouTube video. I don't know. This is starting to feel like it's an ad for Umault, which I promise this isn't, but it is, but I mean, it's not, but we're not intent. But I think what it comes down to is like, you want to maintain confidence throughout the entire system.

What I've found is, so if you're, if right now you work in-house at a brand or if you're a market, brand marketer, right? You know, this is the second anyone senior gets a whiff of lack of confidence or deviation from a plan, especially in creative because there is no truth in creative. Creative is creative.

No one knows. You know how they told Disney that he sucked? Isn't there a letter? There's a letter to Disney himself, Walt Disney saying like, sorry, you don't have what it takes. So like creative is completely subjective and so creative is a confidence thing. Game. It's a con game or whatever it's like, but you're not conning, but it's a confidence thing.

It's like you must maintain confidence throughout the entire thing, or else when the superiors get a whiff that you're flip flopping without logic or you're late on something or something, they just get this wiff and then what happens? They collapse into safety. Like, well, let's just do whatever. You know, like, let's just, all right. Forget that crazy idea. Let's just do what is safe. And I'm telling you, our client gave us trust. She gave us a lot of rope, but we had to deliver on time. We had to do it properly. We had to maintain confidence because she also has to maintain confidence with her superiors. So like part of this, a big part of this is human psychology. It's not even the strength of the idea that gets something through. A lot of times what it is, is that everything else is on the up and up. Things are done on time, things are done to spec. Nothing is like dragging. So I would say that that's the main thing you need to, it's not the main thing.

It's a big thing you need to worry about is don't let your superiors pull the plug because they're losing confidence, like maintain confidence throughout the entire thing, and then that's what will give people confidence to post it. Like, that's a huge step that Slingshot posted it, that they have the confidence to post it.

I mean, that's a, you know, that's a big step. And so that's half the battle I'm sure if you work at a brand or an agency, you've had work that just never saw the light of day or got buried or something. And a lot of times that's because of somewhere in the chain the confidence was broken.

Hope Morley: Yep. Any final thoughts on Slingshot? 

Guy Bauer: I hope we didn't bore people. I mean.

Hope Morley: That's my final thought. Yeah. So thank you everyone for listening. If you liked this episode format, let us know. If you hated it, please also let us know and we won't do it again. If you can fill out the survey that's linked in the show notes, please let us know what you think of the show. We really did read all the responses that we've gotten so far.

Process them. It really helps us out. So thank you again to anyone who's filled it out already.

Guy Bauer: I didn't get to sound like, like a pretentious creative director though.

Hope Morley: Do you've got another minute? Do you wanna do that?

Guy Bauer: Yeah, like, ask me a question like, so where did?

Hope Morley: Where did the idea come from?

Guy Bauer: So, yeah. Um, I think I was at a, I was on a flight, I was taking a flight and I was just thinking about the duality of man. And I think I was having a single malt. And, um, then I, I, I don't know. That's it. That's all I got.

Hope Morley: That's as far as you got.

Guy Bauer: I don't know. On podcasts, everyone sounds so like, maybe not pretentious, but they sound so creative and I feel like when we talk we don't sound like that.  Like, everyone's always like, oh, I forget where. Oh, oh. Was, was I, were we in LA or were we in Austin?

I forget. You know, we're just always in our basements.

Hope Morley: I don't work in my basement. You work in your basement.

Guy Bauer: Anyway, thanks for listening.

Hope Morley: Thanks for listening everyone. So again, please fill out the survey, let us know what you think of the show. And if you want to contact us, you can always find us on our website at umault.com. That's U M A U L T.com. And you can find us across all the social media channels at Umault. Thanks for listening.

Guy Bauer: You're welcome. 

Guy Bauer: Here's a good test. Oh, hold on. Jen’s texting me. Sorry.

Hope Morley: Yeah, I'm not gonna cut this. I'm gonna leave this dead time.