How to Produce a TV Commercial from Start to Finish
Ever wondered how TV commercials are produced and directed? Irrespective of their nature, TV ads often follow the same workflows in order to be made. Collaboration with different teams, from writers to sound professionals, is pivotal and is what ultimately determines how good a commercial will be reaching out to a target audience.
Like in a lot of commercials, the entire process starts with the script. The script contains the story and the action that will take place in the ad. Depending on what the commercial is about, you can shoot in a showroom, in case the commercial is about showing consumer products, or outdoors if the product or service is meant to be used outside. However, the possibilities are endless.
Once the director has received the script, if they’re working with a full team they will have the storyboards drawn. Once they are ready, if there are no corrections, the storyboards are uploaded into Adobe Premiere and animated with music, which is brought and suggested by sound professionals and composers (if they are already working with the production team, otherwise these tracks are chosen by directors themselves).
This animation helps the director time out the commercial and get a more realistic sense of how long, were they to follow all the shots included in the script, the commercial would be.
This early animated version of the commercial is normally discussed with the client to discuss and agree upon the tone and the atmosphere of the ad. Once everything’s been agreed upon, the director starts looking for the ideal cast and the ideal location based on, as mentioned earlier, what the commercial is about.
After the cast has been chosen, the director and the production team start looking for the rest of the teams they will be working with: gaffer, PA, line producer, and the sound team. Once the whole team is assembled, production starts. A production day normally starts with getting the talent ready. Makeup sessions start early in the morning while the director and the gaffer take a look at the storyboards, the script, the location, and essentially every other aspect involved in the production of the commercial.
The production also starts lighting the spaces that they’ll need and if makeup sessions are done, they just go shot by shot, trying different angles, lights, and positions until the director is satisfied with what the moving images look like.
Once this part of the production is taken out of the way and everybody’s satisfied with the result, the files are sent to the sound post-production team, who, based on what they see, pitch a lot of ideas to the director.
A recipe for success
As sound professionals, we’ve seen that in order to succeed at this stage you have to follow a recipe that will help you prevent your ideas from falling through the cracks.
The Brief: You have to be able to listen, interpret, and communicate. As a sound professional you’ll often be talking to directors and creatives who don’t have an extensive sound or musical background. Sometimes they struggle to convey what they’re trying to say and they’ll use things like soft, purple, loud, engaging, and etcetera.
Get used to interpreting and communicating, and always strive to go back and forth with their ideas until you reach common ground.
Gear: When working on set make sure to bring only what you need. This might even sound counterintuitive to some people because they prefer to visit locations fully equipped. However, one can make this process much more efficient by traveling with samples and other pieces of equipment.
Make your own sound a world: As sound professionals, we’re used to dealing with a rather complex terminology that entails terms such as reverb, chorus, delay, et cetera. However, to people who are not used to listening analytically to sound and music, these differences in sound and sound color are gigantic and have the power to set a whole different tone and atmosphere.
When building your sound world, make sure not only to consider the audience the commercial strives to reach out to, but also to gather enough input from the production team and the director to alleviate the process of coming up with sound and musical ideas.
Of course, you will also spend a lot of time cleaning up dialogue lines. Perhaps the vast majority of the time, as the dialogue is responsible for telling the whole story behind the commercial. Pay special attention to it as well and make sure to treat them as carefully as you treat the rest of the sound and musical elements. Given how short ads are in comparison to other types of audiovisual projects, time is of the essence, so everything needs to work perfectly in sync to properly deliver the story to the target audience and get positive results.
*The images used on this post are taken from Pexels.com