Shooting a YouTube Ad in 2020

In the midst of the pandemic, planning a safe and responsible shoot presented a real challenge in making a 30 second ad for the murder mystery builder You Dunnit. Storyboarding and pre-editing were really key for efficient scheduling to minimise contact and shooting time, making sure we worked within the regulations.

The shoot took place over two evenings in two houses, with 30 minute gaps between different actors leaving and arriving. At the time of shooting we were able to have up to six people in a house at any one time. Between myself as a solo shooter and a You Dunnit director, we were able to stay under that threshold. As the couple in the promo belong to one 'household', they were able to sit next each other on the sofa, but everyone else was filmed separately.

Saving time with pre-production

We collaborated over Zoom to plot out each shot and the timings of the script. The idea was to show and tell the product within the first five seconds, before the 'skip' button pops up, but also to create enough interest to retain the audience for as much of the rest of the ad as possible - which seems to have worked okay!

YouTube statistics for relative audience retention throughout playback

We planned the rest of the ad to highlight different ways of playing the game, whilst also implicitly showing how You Dunnit could bring people together during the current pandemic. For example: implying the separation and connection with a telephoto shot through a window of an older man laughing at his laptop as he plays with his family.

After the content was agreed on, I made a quick storyboard with the music and a rough voiceover take. This gave me a shot list to tick off with exact timings. Knowing exactly how each shot and piece of dialogue would fit together made it much easier to get the takes quickly on the day, using a minimal camera rig with a slider and a couple of lights to speed up the setup for each shot.

Just as the 'skip' button appears, it cuts to a wide shot with a fun party-trick as our characters cut between different costumes. The idea was to throw in some new intrigue at this critical timestamp. We recorded several takes of the same movements so that I had a good amount of choice in post to create a fluid transition with each cut.

(It gets a bit nerdy here)

Inside the nested sequence you can see the small speed ramps that push her swipes to line up with the cuts on the beat of the music. The mask was animated to follow her arm movements. Shooting after sunset was really key for controlling the lighting and maintaining consistency across the different takes.

As it was shot in 4.6K, I could animate a subtle zoom back in the main sequence and still keep a full 4K resolution.

For the end screen, I broke up some of the cartoon characters from their branding into vector sections and used the elements to create a simple animation. Adding a bit of sound design with the mouse click and keyboard typing helped sell the visuals.

The final colour grade just polished off the fun mystery drama tone and pulled the blues/purples together to make sure they matched You Dunnit's branding. Here's the finished promo!