The “Own The Weekend” campaign, which promotes the benefits of reading the weekend newspapers published by The Guardian, launched earlier this year in the United Kingdom with a three-minute spot featuring Hugh Grant that spoofed Hollywood movie trailers, going way over-the-top to herald all of the information readers get out of The Guardian publication’s guides to weekend activities.
“Satire brought us the license to be a little louder than usual,” remarked David Kolbusz, deputy executive creative director at BBH London, the agency behind the campaign, noting that the brand isn’t typically so noisy.
In creating the continuation of the “Own The Weekend” campaign for this fall, “We didn’t want to repeat ourselves,” Kolbusz said. “So instead of focusing on our ownership of the weekend, we focused on the consequences of not submitting to the will of The Guardian.”
That line of thinking led to the :30 “MegaGlove.” Directed by Jeff Low of Biscuit Filmworks UK, the spot is yet more evidence that the best commercials are oftentimes based on the simplest of gags.
“MegaGlove” finds a man named Greg standing in front of his flat-screen television wielding a ridiculously massive video game controller billed as the MegaGlove. Playing a bowling game, the guy brings his arm back, gripping an imaginary ball in the glove, then swings his arm forward only to have the contraption fly off and crash into the television screen, breaking it into bits. He is in shock, of course.
As we learn from a voiceover, Greg didn’t pick up a copy of The Observer (published by The Guardian) this weekend with its tech monthly supplement. Instead, he trolled the Internet and bought a MegaGlove. Now, he is left to explain two things to his wife: what a MegaGlove is and why they no longer have a television in their living room. You can’t help but feel for him.
“The idea and script were just funny and smart,” Low replied when asked why he took on the assignment. “I loved the cautionary tale approach.”
The real star of the spot is the MegaGlove itself, which resembles a potholder on steroids. “All I knew is it had to be big and dumb. Big so it could conceivably smash a television and dumb, well, you get dumb for free with an electronic appendage built for virtual bowling. It’s such an incredibly wrong-minded purchase for an adult,” Low mused.
The MegaGlove was built at Artem, an effects shop with offices in London and Glasgow, and as silly as the prop appears, the design process was intensive, according to Kolbusz. “We wanted something big and dumb enough to destroy a television, but it still needed to not immediately telegraph as a gag,” he pointed out. “We didn’t want people to laugh at the glove. We wanted people to laugh at the destruction it caused.”
Setting the locale Once the MegaGlove was ready to go, Low and DP Ed Wild shot the commercial in an ordinary-looking living room in a home in a suburban area of southwest London known as Surbiton. “I was looking for a place that felt casual and didn’t bring up any weird questions so the idea and the performance could take center stage,” Low said. “In this case, it was very much a canvas/paint situation–the actor and the idea being the paint, the location being the canvas.”
Actor Stewart Lockwood was cast as the poor guy who destroys his television, and he plays the scene for real. He doesn’t overdo his reaction when the MegaGlove smashes into the television–he simply stands in place with his hands over his mouth, clearly unable to move or speak. You can feel his horror. “When you cast well, everyone looks like a genius,” Low said. “All I ever try to do is find actors that leave space for the audience to find the laugh on their own and not have it elbowed into their ribs.”
Two televisions were destroyed during the making of “MegaGlove,” both rigged to shatter upon impact. How did the crew react to the sight of perfectly-good televisions dying such violent deaths? Was there a collective scream each time it happened? “It was more a squeal of delight. Nervous tension followed by a squeal of delight, then relief,” Kolbusz recalled. “We only had so many screens, so the break had to be perfect. We got it on the first go.”
Low actually shot a rehearsal on a camcorder and edited it before capturing a single frame so that the agency could see exactly how the action would play out. “That way we could just relax on the day and focus on performance. It was an incredibly helpful exercise,” Kolbusz said.
The artisans from the London office of The Mill enhanced the shot, and editor Ed Cheesman of Final Cut, London, cut “MegaGlove.” “I did a rough cut and got it working just so the guys [from the agency] could get right to the finer points and not waste any time pushing around the big pieces,” Low said. “I made it work in a left-handed scissors type of way. David and his gang made it work better.”
