Frito-Lay aired two commercials during Super Bowl XLI selected from more than 1000 entries in its Doritos "Crash the Super Bowl" challenge.
The official winning entry, "Live the Flavor," was shot with the JVC ProHD HD100 by Dale Backus and Wes Philips. Five finalists were selected from the 1000 entries, and Doritos fans selected their favorite prior to the game in an online poll.
Only a few hundred votes separated the winner from the next entry "Check Out Girl," shot by James West with the Panasonic AG-HVX200 DVCPRO HD P2 camcorder, so Frito-Lay chose to air both submissions during the Super Bowl.
The high-profile Doritos promotion was an opportunity that invited fans nationwide to create and shoot their own 30-second Doritos commercial for a chance to have it aired during the game.
The size of the JVC ProHD HD100 series camcorder made it easy to use handheld in tight spaces, Backus said. The camera's ability to work with interchangeable lenses was especially useful when using a Letus 35mm adapter on the shoot, he said. Shooting in the HDV format also allowed Backus to work in HD without buying enormous amounts of storage because of the format's efficient compression, he added.
Director of photography James West shot "Check Out Girl" with his own HVX200 on "no budget" as a favor to a friend, the commercial's writer/director Kristin Dehnert. The spot was shot after hours in a Los Angeles-area grocery store; total shoot time was approximately three hours. The scenario depicts a friendly cashier flirtatiously discussing her customer's wide-ranging choice of Doritos.
West used two 8GB P2 cards to shoot the spot in HD at 720p. He had an on-set camera assistant working with a laptop with two hard drives; full P2 cards were downloaded to one external hard drive, then copied to the second drive as an archive. Kindra Marra on Avid Media Composer 2.6 with Avid Mojo SDI edited "Check Out Girl." The spot was uploaded to Doritos as a QuickTime file. The filmmakers also submitted a mastered original in two formats, a D-5 HD version and a DigiBeta NTSC 4:3 letterboxed version, for network airing.
For more information, visit www.panasonic.com/hvx200 and www.jvc.com/pro.
