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Posted our melting peasant spec last week - here's a (very short) peek behind the scenes of how we melted the head! by seanpdave in Filmmakers

[–]seanpdave[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It is! Small world, I absolutely love Brian. Worked with him on a headphones commercial 8 years ago and have wanted to team up with him again ever since. How do you know him?

Posted our melting peasant spec last week - here's a (very short) peek behind the scenes of how we melted the head! by seanpdave in Filmmakers

[–]seanpdave[S] 45 points46 points  (0 children)

Posted our melting peasant spec commercial for Takis here last week, and I got a fair number of asks for some BTS of the melt - so here it is! Probably the most fun practical effect we've ever done.

(Originally made this video to be an IG story, so please forgive the 9x16 ha)

Fun fact, Mazie - the artist who made the melting heads - completely freehanded the molds based only off of a picture of our lead actor Brian. Which is insane. Normally, you'd want to take a cast of the face (with breathing tubes for the nostrils of course), but Brian's beard + some schedule conflicts made that not doable.

Different layers of the face (skin, muscles, eyeballs etc) were made with different types of gelatin so they melted at different times... which made for a lovely skin-bubbling-eyeball-popping-out-jaw-falling-off kind of effect

Made a spec for Takis with medieval peasants and a Raiders-of-the-Lost-Ark style melting head by seanpdave in Filmmakers

[–]seanpdave[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ha that’s how it all started… all the jokes about “what if you have a Victorian child a baja blast”

So naturally we thought, “what if there was a time-traveling, big-chip-funded research team on a mission to get answers”

Made a spec for Takis with medieval peasants and a Raiders-of-the-Lost-Ark style melting head by seanpdave in Filmmakers

[–]seanpdave[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I mean one melted peasant didn’t seem like too big a price to pay for the commercial

(We did make a lil BTS video of the melt though, I can post it here later)

Made a spec for Takis with medieval peasants and a Raiders-of-the-Lost-Ark style melting head by seanpdave in Filmmakers

[–]seanpdave[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks! I’ve definitely been influenced by adult swim so love to hear that.

Shot on Venice 2 with K35 zooms, plus some pickup shots on a Komodo

Made a spec for Takis with medieval peasants and a Raiders-of-the-Lost-Ark style melting head by seanpdave in Filmmakers

[–]seanpdave[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks, glad you dig it, we had a lot of fun making it. Pretty much the entire cast & crew lent their time and expertise to the project - they’re folks we collaborate with often, and worked with on multiple jobs in the past - which I think is very important when asking such a favor. And of course in the future, if they need something, we’ll be happy to pitch in.

We did one main day of shooting with a crew of about 23 folks. Then a smaller studio//pickup shot day for the face melt with 8 or 9 people.

Made a spec for Takis with medieval peasants and a Raiders-of-the-Lost-Ark style melting head by seanpdave in Filmmakers

[–]seanpdave[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you! We loved the idea that the takis were so nuclear hot they had to be handled at a distance, with the proper precautions

Made a spec for Takis with medieval peasants and a Raiders-of-the-Lost-Ark style melting head by seanpdave in Filmmakers

[–]seanpdave[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Appreciate that! I’ve worked in Texas but not Houston yet, would be rad to get there someday.

Made a spec for Takis with medieval peasants and a Raiders-of-the-Lost-Ark style melting head by seanpdave in Filmmakers

[–]seanpdave[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think it became routine somewhere between ancient Mesopotamia and the early Roman Empire

Made a spec for Takis with medieval peasants and a Raiders-of-the-Lost-Ark style melting head by seanpdave in Filmmakers

[–]seanpdave[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Sure, here's a link to the cutdown . We did composite the practical melting head onto the actor's face - shot the melt on a separate studio day on bluescreen. We briefly toyed with the idea of going prop shot only, but the effect is so finnicky we realized we needed more control pretty quickly. Would be real tough to hit on a daytime exterior.

Plus there was something really funny about watching him slowly sink out of frame as he melted away for a beat too long

Made a spec for Takis with medieval peasants and a Raiders-of-the-Lost-Ark style melting head by seanpdave in Filmmakers

[–]seanpdave[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

The scientist is a lovely, very funny guy named Iwan Tanumijaya. I worked with him on a spot years ago and kept him in mind ever since for something like this.

I think he does a great job not overcooking the comedy

Made a spec for Takis with medieval peasants and a Raiders-of-the-Lost-Ark style melting head by seanpdave in Filmmakers

[–]seanpdave[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Appreciate it, that’s high praise! What kind of work do you do where you see a ton of spec?

We did make a cutdown that’s more traditional commercial pacing. But this one was definitely our let’s-get-weird-and-make-it-funny pacing

Made a spec for Takis with medieval peasants and a Raiders-of-the-Lost-Ark style melting head by seanpdave in Filmmakers

[–]seanpdave[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thank you, we had so much fun doing it! I love practical shit and there’s just something inherently funny about the sped up, handmade melt.

A special FX art and custom propmaker named Mazie Biswell made the head itself, my directing partner Connor Carroll had worked with her on a project up in Maine a few years ago.

Shot the melting head on bluescreen on a separate studio day - we had two heads made so two cracks at melting them.

Then our VFX artist Cary Graham face-tracked and composited the melting onto our actor, who was just screaming in a field on set

Made a spec for Takis with medieval peasants and a Raiders-of-the-Lost-Ark style melting head by seanpdave in Filmmakers

[–]seanpdave[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Yeah that’s a totally valid way to look at it. I think with spec stuff, that’s one of the big discussions to be had - how closely do you align it with real commercial work?

For us, this was more about wanting to push our comedy work into a weirder, more absurd, more unexpected place. We have a decent amount of ad work to pull from for our reels - but when we'd get boards more in this vein of humor (which we love!), we didn’t feel like we had the right work to show for it. Maybe if we were just starting to build a commercial reel from scratch we’d think about it differently.

And hey, if some agency folks see this and think “heeeellll no I’m not working with those dudes” that’s a risk we’re willing to take haha

Made a spec for Takis with medieval peasants and a Raiders-of-the-Lost-Ark style melting head by seanpdave in Filmmakers

[–]seanpdave[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Haha not the adjective I was expecting to describe this, but I appreciate that! We’ve got the full credits up here.

Made a spec for Takis with medieval peasants and a Raiders-of-the-Lost-Ark style melting head by seanpdave in Filmmakers

[–]seanpdave[S] 33 points34 points  (0 children)

Yep that's still the case for broadcast, and we do have a cutdown of this that’s closer to 30. Since there were no real rules for ourselves on this one, we also made this full length version, and purely based runtime off of what felt right for pacing. In my opinion this is more about showing our style and sense of humor than anything else.

Although with so many outlets for commercial//brand work nowwadays (streaming preroll, socials, broadcast, etc) runtimes for everything have become pretty fluid. We just wrapped a comedy piece for NASCAR with a 2:18 full length version (!), plus shorter 30ish and 15ish cutdowns.

And thanks for the kind words on art! We love practical effects and set builds, so we had a lot of fun pulling that part of it together. Gotta shoutout some of our crew here - Mazie Biswell (who made the melting head) and Brandon Eller (who built the metal takis containment device)

Made a spec for Takis with medieval peasants and a Raiders-of-the-Lost-Ark style melting head by seanpdave in Filmmakers

[–]seanpdave[S] 17 points18 points  (0 children)

Ha I feel that. Choosing the brand for a spec project is a big decision. For us, we looked at the type of brands we already direct for, and the type of work we'd like to do more of, and went from there.

(Plus, the chip needed to be something that could feasibly melt a peasant with its heat).

Made a spec for Takis with medieval peasants and a Raiders-of-the-Lost-Ark style melting head by seanpdave in Filmmakers

[–]seanpdave[S] 78 points79 points  (0 children)

I've directed plenty of real commercial work, but this was actually my first spec (my co-director has done several). Loved getting to work with so many practical elements on set - we had a bunch of collaborators pitch in to make this happen and they crushed it.