It’s all fun.
Penny Skateboards is a fun company and the Painted Fades lines from Penny only highlights this. It shows the true essence of the brand, culminating in the brand’s love for the beach, care free attitude and the desire to roam free. Based in Australia, where surf and skate culture prevail as more than a lifestyle, Penny is taking the culture and vibe back to the roots of action sports.
Working with Wasserman Media Group, we finalized our creative- which was a la Pleasantville, with the overall theme being that in a boring, black and white world, skateboarding is fun and brings life. When working with an agency it’s not unusual to have pre-scripted creative. But being the storytellers we are we have to take a 10,000′ view of the project and make sure all pieces are in place. After a few tweaks to our storyline and finalizing our storyboard, we were off to scout our location. We settled on a small community in San Diego called Bressi Ranch- a manicured, happy, clean town with sidewalks, yards and white picket fences. It would work perfectly.
We approached this commercial very carefully- as the action sports industry is notorious weary of introducing Hollywood ideas that don’t line up with any realism. We cut our teeth in the action sports industry and know the culture like the back of our hands, but we wanted to use this attribute as an opportunity. We could set the environment for our spot and juxtapose our protagonist, the skateboards and skateboarders.
We cut our teeth in the action sports industry and know the culture like the back of our hands.
The piece was shot in an expedited fashion in just one day using one camera and a drone. The drone was a key tool for us. Since our location was a huge part of our story and setting, getting overhead drone shots would allow us to show the transition from black & white world to a world with color, life and fun.
In order to achieve the color matching the way we wanted, we knew we had to shoot on high resolution camera equipment that would give us the resolution necessary in post-production to get the detail required to tell our story. Using state of the art post-production software we were able to remove any color information on a very specific level of detail all tying back into our story. This is where our story came to life, as a film usually does in the editing process.
The story was told in post production color grading.
The campaign consisted of a 1:30 full-length edit, 2x :30, a 2x :15 edits to be used for various marketing elements including online advertising placement, media partner content and Instagram marketing.