Game Day in a Schell Home

I co-wrote Game Day in a Schell Home, a thirty-second commercial for Schell Brothers. With thirty-second commercials, you're trying to nail down a spot that gets the story beats across and promotes the product while landing emotionally, being memorable and looking good.

The beginning was really tough. As I remember it, the line was that it's gonna be dark, it's cramped and it's musty. Then we snap into a new, beautiful, naturally lit home with huge, tall ceilings, wide open concepts and a ton of space. We had to get that stark contrast across. Really, we had to capture the contrast itself, so we didn't have to fully show the first place.

So we filled the frame with the whole cast, upstairs in the same model home, and had them huddle up, because, well, it's game day. We shot it low angle, so all we see is a ceiling, and then we lit it: low, dim, harsh lighting, with the cinematic crop bars on to make it thematically dramatic. Bump, bump. It feels like you're getting ready for a game, but they're prepping for the game at someone's house.

The huddle works because it obscures. We didn't need a whole other set or location. We literally used the same place we were already at, then went and shot the big wide living room shot with all the light coming in, and we had both houses in one location right there. Boom.

There was a bunch more in editing, too. We had to stitch specific frames together and do a lot of match cuts to get from the huddle shot into the house, because otherwise it would be hard to contextualize everyone. We were jumping through so quickly that we couldn't show the host greeting everyone at his house and saying, oh, hey, welcome to my new home and all that.

So to jump over that story beat, we made a match cut from the end of the huddle to them putting a bowl down on the coffee counter. The audience visually matches the hands in the huddle to the bowl, and that subverts the context of greeting his guests at the door. We could present the greeting in the living room, where we actually wanted it to take place, and the audience wouldn't question it.

That musty line is also where the vent came from. Since the line calls it musty, we were like, we're gonna say he's got clean air. Our teammate just smells the vent, and we had him say, that's fresh. That vent idea was one hundred percent my idea, and I knew he would be down for it. I wouldn't have suggested it to anyone had I not known them personally and worked with them, so that's where that worked out well. It actually spawned inspiration for another commercial a year later, with some more dudes doing the same thing. I think they were comfortable being goofy because they saw him be goofy in that first one.

That also kinda made him famous around town, which was kinda funny. He just works for us. We used our own employees in our commercials, not actual actors, because with scheduling and things it was just easier to have people who were available on our team.

Looking back, I'm pretty sure those are the reasons I made those decisions. At the time, it was easier to just make them than to explain why I was making them that way. Game Day in a Schell Home went on to win a National Gold Award at NAHB's The Nationals 2024 for Best 30–60 Second Commercial.

† Awards recognize the work and its whole production team.