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Promotional videos for public events, retail products, corporate clients, etc

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The rPlank™ Commercial

The rPlank is a satirical take on Apple’s staggeringly popular tablet computer, the iPad. Their histories and capabilities are eerily similar. Take a look!

In the spring of 2010 Steven P. Jobs unveiled the iPad tablet computer to the world. Within a month Captain Drew had unveiled the pirate equivalent of the iPad to the befuddled residents of a small medieval village due south of Atlanta, Georgia. He named it the rPlank™ and immediately priced it far out of the price range of the entire population of the planet Earth.

During the late summer of 2010 Captain Drew approached me with the idea of shooting a shot-for-shot copy of Apple’s first iPad commercial, but featuring the rPlank™. I went through the commercial and built a breakdown of each scene and developed the pirate equivalent of each item. The amount of work it required meant that the commercial would take a bit longer than expected because we first needed to purchase and fabricate a lot of items, both real world and in the computer.

Over the winter of 2010/2011 I approached David Stuart, a professional editorial photographer, about shooting the commercial for the Captain, since I’m really not trained in that arena. He agreed and I began sharing the storyboards with him. Along the way some more friends (Chris Mills, Laurie Garner, Dwight Benjamin-Creel, Barbara Benjamin-Creel, and Shawn Gray) joined in to help behind the scenes, while a bunch more friends agreed to be in the commercial since they’re skilled period costumers and performers.

It took us 4 or 5 days to shoot the various elements seen in the commercial, and we shot at the Georgia Renaissance Festival, the Brick Store in Decatur, an in-town photography studio near Manuel’s Tavern, and a private residence near Marietta.

Near the end of shooting I sat down to write a user’s manual called “The Official Survival Guide to the rPlank™”, an on-demand book which is available from Amazon.com and via Lulu.com (look for the link in the sidebar).

As a group we put forth an awful lot of effort for a terribly obscure (and apparently indigent) client, but Captain Drew seems to have a way of always tricking people into doing all sorts of crazy stuff for him.

Category

Motion

Client

Captain Drew

Media

Motion picture

Software

Final Cut, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop

YouTube Link

The rPlank™ Commercial

External Site(s)

Official rPlank™ Website

Year

2011

License

All Rights Reserved

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