Find Your Happiness

Find Your Happiness

Find Your Happiness is a campaign of four commercials we made for Schell Brothers: Dream Car, Sandcastle, Nightlight and Hide and Seek. Sandcastle plays out on a beach with a multi-generational cast, a big sandcastle and a physical comic payoff. Dream Car started with a lens.

The image came first; the story came later. I had been thinking about what a probe lens could do, though I don't remember the exact first spark. I knew I wanted to rent one, light a model car in low light like a full-size vehicle, and make it read like an automotive film.

We wanted to fake people out. We wanted to make them think they were watching a car commercial first. So our two-person team worked backward from that image into a story, which I co-wrote: what looks like a luxury-car commercial turns out to be a grandfather and grandson painting a model car together.

We made the opening practically, in a warehouse attic: cardboard on the floor, a pane of glass under the model, misters, a small slider and a tiny smoke machine. That dark studio atmosphere sets up the luxury-car commercial. Then we moved to a model home for the reveal, where the scale changes.

The British-accent voiceover is mine. We didn't have a booth, so I recorded it with a lavalier mic under hoodies in the warehouse bathroom, right next to the edit bay. I made roughly eight passes, going back and forth between the bathroom and the edit to find the right cadence. I'm still not completely happy with it.