The team at Stardust recently completed a commercial campaign for 7-Eleven, featuring the iconic Slurpee. Created primarily for broadcast, the campaign is a Social Media-inspired collage of stills, video and stop-motion sequences that capture the spirit of a ”Slurpee Summer.”
Rather than take the standard filmmaking approach, Stardust director/partner Seth Epstein embraced the social nature of the commercial by sharing the helm. “I told the on-camera talent, the agency and even the crew to bust out their phones and be part of the process of making the commercial,” said Epstein. “I thought, if we are trying to capture the feeling of Social Media, why not just let the entire shoot become social and participatory? It was structured, but experimental all at the same time.”
Stardust gathered more than 30,000 photos in just two days. “The original goal was to ensure we captured 5,000 images,” said Dexton Deboree, managing director/partner, Stardust. “We ended up with truly, socially-engaged photos as our Photographers and DPs were part of the subject matter and created their own content organically by simply having fun in the most natural way with one another. Our goal was to truly embrace the spirit of the message we were hoping to convey.”
The Stardust team reverted back to more traditional filmmaking techniques in post, first editing the photos together and then building the complex grid and stop-motion animation sequences in After Effects. A small team worked around the clock to deliver the film six days after it was shot.
