Behind the Scenes Making an 80s Film & The Creative Process - Documenting the journey - Episode 23

Yo. Back with another episode. I thought I'd mix it up for once. I was actually gonna record an episode without a cap on, but it almost feels like bad luck at this point. But don't worry, caps. I put it on. Instead of running through like a week of stuff. I thought given I spent yesterday, the whole day in a studio doing a shoot for the first time since the original shoot. Thought I'd run through a bit of that process and how maybe my mind works in that respect and how like, logistically things work in that respect. I'm not that organized with this sort of stuff, but I thought I'd show you a kind of behind the scenes in a different part of the business. Really, like how I come up with these concepts for what I think are pretty unique creative things, not the brand as a whole. Want to just go over like the video stuff for now, this particular campaign, and just run through how my mind works with that because, yeah, I just think it'd be interesting. Mix it up for once rather than just randomly rambling. I'm sure I will ramble a lot as well. I'll share part of my screen on here. Don't know if I'm sharing it right now. So website, brand content. I want to dive into the. Nothing exists until you create it. 80s commercial that I did at the start. So reference point. I'm talking about this one. I don't know if you've seen this yet. I don't know if the audio comes out on this. If not, I'll put it in. But yeah, this was the 80s film that we did for the brand before we launched it. Arguably pretty unnecessary. That doesn't drive sales. You know, we're not running ads to this, at least right now. But I think it's fucking sick. It's the part of the brand that I. I get most excited by this sort of stuff. And this came out like a Stranger Things Netflix film, in my opinion. If you haven't watched it, you should go watch it. But I'm gonna watch it back right now. So this was in this house we rented. I mean, I'll walk through. Which order should I do this in? We'll watch Bitbur first. This was in this house we rented. The whole thing was like this concept that I came up with. And Brad, the creative genius that makes all this shit reality. And it came out pretty perfectly in the end. I thought every time I watch it, I get gas. Just like the soundtrack, the aesthet, the whole vibe was just like my mind in a video and it came out fucking perfectly. I think. Yeah, if you've not watched that, go and watch it. It's like three minutes long. Not many views. 8,000 views. Again, we haven't run out to this. This doesn't drive revenue. It's more of a brand thing, more of an aesthetic thing. You know, arguably, if we didn't have it, would it make any difference? Maybe not. But for me, I think it's like super important to fucking do cool shit. And I've never in my life seen a supplement brand do something like this. I could be wrong, but we have one coming for Dream Dust in next month as well, which is gonna be a literal fucking movie compared to this. Like another level beyond. And it's the stuff that just gets me gassed. It's probably just an excuse for me to make movies. I'll be involved in making them, but I really fucking enjoy it. But yeah, I sort of walked through the process of how I came up with that. Cause a lot of people kind of asked me, like, what does that involve? Was it really expensive? All this sort of shit. But I guess, I mean, yeah, I'm a pretty creative person. I think, like, that stuff is the stuff that gets me most excited. It's the side of the business that doesn't necessarily move the needle with numbers and probably doesn't, to be honest. Definitely doesn't. But I think it's worth it. Long term is super exciting. So, yeah, this is basically how I organize it. So I got a bunch of other ideas that are currently in the pipeline of different products. You'll see here. I called it nothing exists until you create it. Which is like this phrase I came up with and kind of call like the brand campaign that if you like. But yeah, literally I organized my entire business with Google Drive, so a lot of people probably do. I have a certain structure which maybe I'll walk through in a different video, but literally started with like a blank sheet, basically. So, I mean, this was just kind of me brainstorming. It probably started on like iPhone notes or something, but just reading this. But I haven't looked at this for ages. But this is kind of how I come up with ideas and present them to people before we make them real, which is kind of the hard part. General concept for the shoot introduced the brand, blah, blah, blah, and a very unique standout waves. And we did never see anyone do that before. 80s synthwave, utopian aesthetic, blah, blah, blah. You get the idea. This is more of like a spec sheet for the shoot, I think brainstorm wise. I probably deleted a lot of stuff, but had, like, an idea for a backing track, which was originally something else, and then a voiceover style that I wanted, which is obviously like the super American exaggerated style. Bunch of props I wanted. This was before we actually got them model outfits. Blah, blah, blah. How to actually source a model. The model in the video wasn't actually like a formal. Not like a professional model. It's just some girl off Instagram. So got her involved. Source the location, which I used a website called Gigster for. I'm not logged in. Fuck it. But Gigster.com is the website you can, like, hire sick locations. Found this place wasn't that cheap. But, yeah, obviously you recognize all these from the shoot. Had an idea of what wanted to film before. And this is basically all I produced in terms of, like, specifics. I had this vision in my head, but then getting it into reality is like the harder part. That's where Brad came in. That is the genius that makes a lot of my stuff now and made this. He actually made it a reality. But, yeah, this is kind of how I lay out my thoughts, you know, really, really fucking simple. There's probably loads of iPhone notes at the time that I can't find now that I was coming up with. Then I wrote a script. I literally wrote this in, like, I'm gonna say five minutes. It's not five. I probably spent like an hour on it. I did it in pretty much, like, one take. I just put a backing track of music on. That's another thing. Like, when I'm coming up with this sort of stuff. Did I have a mood board for this? Don't think I did, but I probably came up with, like, a Pinterest board and then had, like, a Spotify playlist. Listen to the Spotify playlist while. While writing this. Or in fact, listen to the backing track, which is Sunset by the Midnight. Haven't yet been sued for using it. And then just wrote this in one take, pretty much. And that's obviously what you hear.

Nothing is out of reach, ready to go. A life you never ever want to.

Go to sleep because you're living your dreams for real every single day. It's cool when you write that sort of down and it actually comes real. I like the whole vibe.

The girl, you can enter a prime.

State to create just, like, neon lights, this sort of vibe. I've always just been obsessed with that aesthetic. And Neon beach was the first time going into that sort of look. And with this, which just came out perfectly, I wanted to Be, like, super sarcastic. I just thought it was quite funny. Just different. And like, stranger things vibes finally reach.

Your truly massive untapped.

This is just me indulging myself. To be fair, every time I watch it back, the vibes are just good. I like it. It's good. But, yeah, write that script. Wrote that script. Am I still recording this? Yeah, I didn't record an episode last week when I thought I did. Yeah. Basically wrote the script and then the posters. Yeah, that's another thing. The posters, which you'll see in. You might have seen these in the back of my podcast. I designed these, like, four years ago, and they were going to be a brand called Neon Beach Original. There's going to be a canvas brand that I never used. So, like, that's the poster there. One of them. Where's the other ones? Oh, by the way, when he says nothing exists until you create it. So that's Brad editing his voice. I want it to sound like some, like, 80s girl calling someone. That bit there. Where are the other posters? Want to show you the posters. I think, like, three of them got featured. Yes. That's the one that's in the pod. The Dream Big. Oh, no, it's not. That's number one. Yeah. So these are. I designed these, like, four years ago, basically. So that was the one that was in. That was in the background. It's kind of like planting Easter eggs, because these are like, shit that I've had for ages and used to be a Neon beach thing. It's trying to, like, make this franchise out of my own fucking life. I guess I link things. The Dream World poster was in this scene. So sick. And then these are just a few other posters. I'm trying to see if another one was actually featured in it. I don't think it was. Maybe there's one in this. Yeah. So there. He probably can't really see it. That's the fuck's sake. Going too big. That's the other one. This one. Thoughts become things. I think three of them were featured in the actual movie. The film. How you want to call it? This focus one I've got in my living room over here. But I think that made the cut to the actual video. Yeah, it's fucking cool. So, yeah, these all featured in it. Where was I going with this? Props. I planned a lot of props. I wanted to just fucking look unique. And it was literally a case of just. I think Brad went on ebay and we bought these. Obviously, these are all featured in the movie. They weren't that expensive, to be honest. The location again, like I said, I saw Style on Gigster, which is a sick website and these like we're just shop planning at this point. Was there anything else? And then the final content, I mean obviously this is just like the final cut, which you can see on YouTube and a lot of images. But yeah, let me see. Did I write the list of costs? Yeah. So basically this entire shoe, I don't think I wrote it down in here to be fair. I don't know where it is. Probably somewhere else. But this whole thing only cost like, I think it was literally like three grand all in or three and a half. And honestly I've had people ask me like how much did it cost? Thinking it cost like 20k. And I think it looks like it did. To be honest. It came out like super, super professional. I've seen one or two commercials from other brands that I know for a fact cost like 20k. Plus from naming no names. Some of them were clearly copying this style and I think this looks better than any of them to be honest, or at least as good. So it just goes to show you don't have to spend a huge amount. It's more about being creative. And this is where like small details. So like, I mean it's not. Not that cool. But I wrote like Rainbow Dust LFG or some shit. Rainbow Dust version 1, 2022 LFG. It's just like all these little details that in 5 years time when the brand is hopefully a fucking billion pound brand, you'll look back and it'll tie into something I've done later on. So yeah, there's that basically. So that was kind of the nothing distance to create film. That was a brief overview relatively. And then a more recent one was. So I did a. Well, we've got Dream that's coming next. Right. So the plan with these campaigns, I guess I call them brand story campaigns, is is I want to basically make a movie per main product that we release and then it effectively becomes like a fucking movie franchise. Like I don't know, Harry Potter 1, 2, 3 or that's a really bad example. But like Stranger Things Season 1, Season 2, each film has a legitimate storyline which is relevant to the product. Granted it's like more of an artistic depiction rather than like explaining the product, but it will actually link to the next one. So like Dream Dust, I don't know if I can fucking show you. There's probably some cringe shit on here. I'll show you a bit of this. Just to show the process, because this is what we're filming next, the Dream Dust. I chase my dreams while I'm awake. I don't know if there's anything fucking cringe or shit on here. So, yeah, this is just. I was actually gonna potentially feature in this myself. And it's gonna be semi based on a certain part of real life, which is then gonna link back to the original movie. It's completely unnecessary. I know, but it's just, like, sick. And then these are all like. Yeah, this is more like proper brainstorming, so soundtracks you might use. And these fucking posters I wanted to do based on certain 975 lyrics. And, like, each one's gonna relate to, like, the actual plot or whatever and be like a lyric that I like. And, yeah, these are all just random ideas. Oh, yeah, this was no idea. So pro cement, say props. So I was gonna include, like, a neon beach sign, a midnight city pendant. And, like, you see, I mean, it's just like all these little details that probably don't matter to anyone else, but I just think it's cool. So, yeah, Dream Dust is coming next and we're gonna. Yes, it's another thing I'm gonna actually include. I'm gonna hire this a DMC DeLorean and actually drive it because it's gonna relate to this where the star, she sees that on tv. So that's on tv right? In a second. Is that in a second? What? That was the ad. Then she turns the TV on, it come off here again. This shot is so sick. I don't think it comes on TV again. But does it come on TV again? The dmc. Oh, you get the idea. That was an ad from the tv. It's another car. And then she sees the space God.

Cape Town and beyond.

Shot. So sick. Anyway, yeah, so this is gonna be featured in the actual one, me driving it. And then it's also gonna reference the famous Drive Ryan Gosling scorpion jacket. Just because it's fucking sick. And it's very 80s. I might actually try and get one that's got a Space Goods logo on the back, depending on how fucking expensive it is. And, yeah, it's all gonna tie into each other. So this is like my. My grand plot for. For the Dream Desk shoot. But coming back to another type of shoot. So this is probably very unorganized. I realized that we hadn't actually explained, like, the product that much. So, like, these brand story ones are a bit more, like, romantic and arguably pointless, but very fucking artistic. Whereas yesterday spent the whole Day doing this, which you should have done right at the start, to be honest. Like a website explainer video. And this was a bit more organized and I've got some behind the scenes footage which I'll show you in a minute as well. But yeah, this was the process with this. So basically I wanted to come up with it. We wanted to shoot that explained the product and like the primary goal with it was to have a video I guess similar in use case to something like this. Not that I'm promoting Mud Water, big competitor, but like basically anyone can watch it and know what Rainbow Dust is. Because so many comments saying what the fuck? Like what is Rainbow dust? What do you actually do? I don't get it. Like it looks cool, you know, this sort of shit makes it very sexy. Blah, blah. But what is it? So this was the goal with this shoot. This is as organized as I get, to be honest. It's a fucking Google sheet. Found a studio, that's where it was in East London obviously the time. Found a model, blah, blah blah. And then yeah, this was as far as I went with it. I had a basic outline, a short list, certain stuff I wanted to achieve. Certain reference points for Brad, who is the brains behind this really. This was like me just coming up with the main ideas which he had input on. But he goes and makes it really similar thing. Like wrote down all the props we needed, blah blah, blah, blah blah. And full transparency. How much did this cost? This cost was. I don't know if I can share his numbers, but whatever. Yeah, so this shoot, full day shoot for load of shit, it's five and a half grand pretty much all in, which is including back by the way. So effectively less than that. But that includes obviously studios, like a grand all in filming and editing, like 3K equipment that we rented on the day. Like roughly 650 model. 650 roughly. Props, not that much, 160 and then they're probably like another 80 on top of that for like travel for the model or whatever. But five and a half grand all in which to me seems pretty reasonable. That was budgeted into the November budget for content. And I have a budget relative to revenue levels and targets per month that that budget this month was thirteen grand on content. Five and a half of which is going here on a website shoot. So yeah, like this shoot we came up with literally in about a week. So like maybe a week, a week and a half. Two weeks ago we decided we're doing this shoot. I came up with this stuff then I wrote a Script. So I wrote this script in literally about about five minutes. Five minutes. All right, 15, 20 minutes. It was way more rushed than the last one. And it's the script that the model was reading. You know, what is Rainbow Dust? Want it to be like, very sarcastic, but also actually explain things and be informative and. Yeah, it's pretty rough and ready. Like Brad, who does all the. All the production, all the main creative stuff, he basically takes my ideas, which are very mismatched and disorganized and fucking retarded in a way, and makes them real and actually tangible on the day. And he's the guy that edited this and does all my cool edit stuff. He's a fucking genius. So. Yeah, and then I will show you some of the actual footage, although I don't know if I'll be able to do that. Yeah, so just drag this in. Don't know if you'll be able to see this, but I'll play it back afterwards. Anyway. So, yeah, this is behind the scenes stuff. So I just wanted to actually show what the studio looks like. So this was an all in one studio in the sense that we had like the full floor. So I had like a white background area as well as this sick kitchen stuff. Kitchen stuff. Kitchen studio. And like having a kitchen in a studio is fucking ideal. We're gonna use the white background as well. The white background cove bit didn't end up using that actually at all in this shoot. And I find on shoes, the setup tends to take like, I'm gonna say like a third of the day, the setup and take down. And then in every shoe I do because I want it to really match like the 80s style that's kind of become consistent, which I'm just fucking obsessed with. It seems to work now for the brand. We have these bars, like these, I think like a stare or something. And it just gives like such a sick lighting. Honestly, if I could have this set up for. For the podcast, I'd probably be more excited to start doing it again. And then this radio from the previous shoot, we did this scene at the start, which I don't think was filmed where she stops the music rather than starts. It's just like trying to relay it to the previous shoot. Trying to make all these like Easter eggs for like brand super fans that might notice. And yeah, this is just me fucking filming some shit with the new Drake album on Brad and Jordan, who does more of the actual video stuff. But these lights just give a sick fucking vibe to all of it. And yeah, they basically Turn my idea into actual content. So let me just skip through a bit. There we go. So we had a different model for this shoot that actually looks lit the cinematics making movies all day long. Yeah, that's right. Different model for the shoot. Well sir film. And then we did like a bunch of Q and A stuff. This is just me fucking. I don't help on these shoots. I basically sat in the corner eating crisps and just filming a bit of stuff because it looked wavy. Yeah, there's a competitor on there. We're gonna blur that out in the actual video. But yeah, we did like an explainer video and then loads of like Q and A stuff and basically everything was about explaining the products. Just making it very clear what it is, what it does, what it compares to, what it's not, what it is, etc and putting that all on the website. And then a bunch of like sciency stuff. And I was trying to get raw mushrooms like Lion's man and so on, but I couldn't find this stock anywhere. So Brad's gonna after effects those in Fuck this compared to by the. And.

Yeah, it's like like a hot chocolate or chocolate milkshake. You know, it's really nice. You can't taste any weird flavors like mushrooms.

I feel like it must be so awkward being a model anyway for some of this stuff.

Oh, this one's way less potent.

But yeah, there seems to be a theme of brunette models and pink lights so far which I should probably. Maybe I should mix that up because half our customers are definitely like middle aged women. So I don't know what I like maybe isn't necessarily what the customer base likes. But yeah, we filmed a load of shit. There's me looking like a fucking cunt wearing one of many wavy shirts. But yeah, it's fun to actually get on shoots because I spend 90% of my time behind a computer. So a shoot day feels like the only time properly get out and do the more fun stuff. So I'm looking forward to doing more of them. And the dream does shoot next. Yeah, this is like a. It's really shit behind the scenes content in it. I should have done like a proper vlog or whatever. But she did take it back in the end and I think she did like it. But yeah, I mean that's kind of the process really. There's way more winging it than people think. So I bear messages when I launch saying, oh, how did you make this? Like did you get an agency in Blah blah. No, it was just me few ideas Brad making it real, working together. Pretty scrappy but it came out really fucking well. And I'm excited to see Dream Dust and I'm excited to see the website shoot and yeah, like was this remotely informative? Let's watch the end of this. Such a vibe. Anyway, yeah, I hope that fucking made some sense. I'm gonna try and edit. This can really complicated edit for me compared to normal because I've screen share and I'm overlaying and I'm speaking about stuff but yeah, that's probably like 25 minutes as normal is it? Was it 24 minutes but I thought I'd just show a different side to the business and a bit more specific. I'm gonna go into some more specific background stuff as well and other videos like logistics, product development, other stuff as well. A bit more Q and A and mix it up. But hopefully that was interesting. This is definitely my favorite part of the business. She's just sadly like probably 1% of my time gets spent on this on like a monthly basis. But yeah, it's cool. I don't think there's many supplement brands doing this sort of shit. And like the video says nothing exists until you create, I guess so you just gotta try and get your ideas into reality. And that's what I'm trying to do with this brand in general. And it's a cool evergreen piece of content.

You rise to the occasion, unlock a.

New world of colors and dreams.

It's not all as crazy as it seems. It's all based on science after all.

Sam.