Mind The Gap’s attempt to produce an on hold music and messaging commercial with background music provided by Aidan & Ethan. Watch how Marc Gallo tries to direct his co-actors (really his twin boys) to no avail.
History
This production was done during the summer of 2010. Aidan & Ethan were 6 years old and discovered that Daddy’s studio was a convenient extension of their playroom.
Naturally, my paternal instinct was to discourage such frolicking around such expensive equipment and, at times, had to insist that they vacate the premises immediately. But when they would look at me with melancholic, puppy dog eyes and beg that “all they want to do is play” I decided to do a production with us all involved. This way I could both monitor their activities in the studio and have fun with the boys at the same time.
An Idea Of An On Hold Messaging Commercial Is Born…
Always thinking of creative ways to include my sons in the business, I thought producing with them an on hold music and messaging commercial about Mind The Gap would be a novel idea. Plus, one of my ulterior motives, is to find ways for them to run the business one day . Perhaps, maybe I could retire early. All nice thoughts but it didn’t quite turn out that way.
My initial conception was to produce a “scripted” commercial. Basically I would read from a script and we’d role play a more or less father-son relationship. It might be extemporaneous but not entirely because I was following a script which would help with continuity.
Well that was pretty much “wishful thinking”. As we performed take after take, the amount of errors and omissions grew exponentially. Curiously enough, it was I who was consistently making the mistakes. Aidan and Ethan were famously just being themselves.
Nevertheless, I felt there were enough takes where I could “piece together” a commercial.
An Attempt At A Commercial Is…well…attempted
As I perused the footage, I discovered that all the mishaps were a performance unto themselves. It was completely improvised and spontaneous. The boys didn’t see it as a performance though. They were just being silly and goofy, taking no care in perfecting their act. Whereas, myself was failing miserably at just reading the teleprompter. Pathetic…
So I presented my findings to Andrea and suggested that we make a commercial about trying to make a commercial. She concurred and edited the commercial, including titles and sound effects.
Some Technical Notes
There was no pretense to produce a professional commercial. As you can tell, we just used a home video recorder and existing lighting. Clearly more lighting would have been helpful but, as they say, hindsight is always 20/20.
After importing the footage to our laptop, it was edited on iMovie 10.
We could produce a few more of these commercials from all the footage but we thought we’d spare you and let this attempt at a “professional” on hold music and messaging commercial speak for itself.
