Healing the Family from Donald Kilgore on Vimeo. | Commercial for Second Baptist Church. | Created By: Donald Kilgore, Cody Bess, & Scott Brignac

The Production

The concept behind this commercial was to show the various phases a family will go through and the ups and downs in marriage. We decided on the refrigerator in the kitchen because it added an interesting prop, represented time passing as the door opened and closed, and showed all the things the refrigerator sees and experiences in the family home. 

We started looking on Craigslist for used refrigerators and calling local appliance repair shops for a used refrigerator. We wanted something cheap and did not want to spend more than $200 on the prop. We also wanted specifically a refrigerator that had the freezer on top and not a side by side model. This design would give us maximum width inside of the box so the perspective could be as wide as possible. After searching for a few days and finding nothing someone in the office suggested an old refrigerator that was longer being used deep in the storage hallway of our department. It was perfect! The whole time we had been looking all over city and we had exactly what we needed a hidden few hundred feet away. 

After five guys wrestled this beast up, over, and through the most complex maze of junk you can imagine we finally had our refrigerator sitting in the middle of the studio. The next thing we needed to do was cut a hold in the back of the box so we could get the camera back far enough for the shot. This is easier said than done, it took almost an hour to cut a 2.5' x 2.5' hold through the thick back of the refrigerator. We wanted the hole to be as large as possible to give us as much flexibility as possible with camera placement. I used a 35mm Nikon AIS f1.4 lens on the 5D to create an interesting wide perspective with minimal lens distortion.

Lighting

We rigged a small Kino Flo car light inside of the refrigerator that was manually turned on and off as the door opened and closed to recreate the look of the standard light inside of a refrigerator. Another Kino Flo Diva-Lite was mounted inside of the freezer with the door left open to light the actors. Everything was shot on green screen lit with Kino's digital green tubes. Lighting with green tubes make keying much easier in post as it really enhances the color of the green screen. 

All the hard work paid off. Using the refrigerator as a prop and the unique perspective through the refrigerator created an interesting and fun spot from a fairly simple concept.

After we finished the project, the refrigerator was packaged up and moved to a storage facility for future projects. I am sure eventually we will use this prop again on a future project.

Healing Broken America from Donald Kilgore on Vimeo. | Commercial for Second Baptist Church | | Created By: Donald Kilgore, Cody Bess, & Scott Brignac

The Production

Do you know how hard it is to shoot inside of an actual hospital? We found out on this project. Shooting at any medical facility is nearly impossible and rightly so. After spending a few days trying to find a location we discovered the best option would be to create our own hospital room. We rented a hospital bed for the day from a local medical equipment supplier and created our own heart monitor with graphics and played it off of a laptop to the external computer monitor. The television was composited and the Uncle Sam costume was from Frankel's costume shop in Houston. Frankel's is an excellent source for almost any costume you can imagine. They have a huge warehouse located in the warehouse district of Houston. It is a great little Houston gem that you have to see to believe.