Anatomy2

A simple enough shot, a portrait of someone talking to the camera. What he's saying was written by someone else, and if Robert were an actor it'd be plain sailing, the director would adjust the performance at will. Robert is a soldier, and to his credit, was relaxed and able to repeat the dialogue many times until it sounded as if he'd just made it up. Like you do when you stand around and talk to yourself in public.

The only issue in my mind, was that the dialogue was trying to get across a point, some information that the advertising people want you to hear, and it will never sound really realistic coming out of the mouth of a non actor. Or anyone for that matter. In this case, that was the concept of the commercial and my job was to deliver the end result as good as it could be.

This took two hours to shoot, in blinding sunlight with a make up artist hiding behind the tree to mop his brow of sweat. Naturally, when we had gotten the lighting, the background extras and dialogue working perfectly, we had to switch the actor out for another one, for the Hispanic version of the commercial, and do it all again.

Does it look like a junior college somewhere? It's actually part of the motor pool on an Army base.
On the left are the storyboards, drawn weeks or months earlier by an artist, based on a script or ideas that the advertising agency and the director have fleshed out. Where he's standing, what he's wearing and who's in the background, it's all fake,but these decisions were all made long before the cameras or the actor ever get to the location. Remarkably the end result is pretty close to the original storyboard. The guy in the storyboard even looks like Robert and appears to be wearing his shirt, amazing how that happens.