When you have the opportunity to shoot a commercial with a top rock group, you have a narrow time window to shoot through. And you only get one chance. Their time is in high demand when they are on top – it may not last and must be exploited quickly.
I have had the opportunity to work shoots with quite a few celebrities, amongst them Wayne Gretzky, Bill Cosby, June Lockhart, Alex Baumann, Henry Altuve, Eddie Shack, Count Floyd, Ronnie Hawkins and, when I was younger, Sir John A. Macdonald, plus many others. Some better known, some lesser known.
Whoever they were, we felt they were bringing something positive to the brand being advertised in elevating the brand’s awareness. The trick was to keep the brand as the star.
Some are easy to work with. Some a royal pain in the ass. But sometimes the difficulties we encounter with them was not of our making, or theirs.
Calexis was contracted to create the television advertising for the first Molson Canadian cabin party back in the late 90s. The idea of the promotion to award winners an invitation to a private party for about 200 people at a closed site. There were four cabin parties scheduled across the country, one for each long weekend in the Canadian summer; one in each region.
There was to be a live concert at a small venue in each of the locations by one of four well known rock bands: Def Leppard, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Lenny Kravitz, and Alannah Myles.
But, as we said in the commercial, “You have to win to get in.” It was among the first promotions of this kind to be staged, bringing exclusive access to a highly desired event. Hard to believe now when so many beer brands are doing it.
We designed our campaign so that we could shoot insert sections of the rock stars and edit the footage into that existing campaign message with an explanation of the private Cabin Party the winners would get access to.
Since we were shooting in the early spring, our outdoor cabin party campaign party section was scheduled for late April in North Carolina. There it looks like Ontario does in the summer a couple months later. A little season slight of hand.
As for the rock stars, they were available off and on during the summer. Only Alannah Myles could actually make it to our North Carolina location.
As luck would have it, we were able to meet Def Leppard in Montreal on the first of April. They had one day available for our shoot between scheduled concerts in Montreal and Ottawa.
Off we go to Montreal to shoot the brief outdoor scene with the band. However, despite global warming, when we arrived in Montreal on April 1, five inches of fresh snow arrived with us,
We only had Def Leppard for the day. Snow was blocking the possibility of any outdoor shoot. The production company now had to scramble to rent a studio and stage it with a limo similar to the ones we had shot in North Carolina. Our idea was to shoot as much as we could in close up.
Most of the day, my art directing partner, Brian Hannigan, and I sat and chatted with the band’s leaders, Joe and Rick. They had a pressing problem – what jet to buy so they could live in Ireland to reduce their onerous English taxation, while still attending Sheffield football games.
Nice fellows who found mega fame. They were very patient with us hanging out and relaxing for a shoot that took about eight hours to prepare for and two to shoot.
And yes, I also shook the drummer’s hand.
If you know what to look for you might be able to tell what footage was shot in the Montreal studio and what was shot elsewhere in North Carolina or Toronto. But for most of the public, they never knew the pressure and problem that Montreal’s April snow provided.
Click here to check it out. Molson Canadian Rocks – Def Leppard-640×480