We were able to collaborate on a fantastic project with Acorns, teaming up with Director Maribeth Romslo. The creative, a vertically shot and delivered social media advertisement, was handed down from the internal Acorns marketing team to the very capable hands of Maribeth Romslo – her directive was to take the rough mold and make it into a finalized, polished piece for paid social media ads.
Maribeth began by hiring out her crew, which started with hiring Added Element Co-Founder Matthew Deery (yours truly!) to help produce the project, as well as Minneapolis Producer Evelyn Sadowski. One of the brand ambassadors for Acorns is international women’s soccer star, two-time FIFA World Cup Champion, two-time Olympic Gold Medalist, Carli Lloyd. The whole commercial spot centered around this standout athlete, a message to help encourage women to invest more of their resources into their stock portfolios.
With Carli calling the Philadelphia area home, our plan was to bring the production to her stomping grounds. After that determination, we set off on scouting several different soccer field options, both indoor and outdoor. The production date was looking to land sometime in the late fall, which can provide weather options ranging from bright, sunny and quite pleasant days to bitterly cold and dreary. As we neared the targeted production date, we locked in an indoor facility to have the most control over our shooting environment and to ensure our production wasn’t derailed by a bad weather day. And we are glad we did, because even shooting indoors, it was still a cold set (we had to have the doors open for awhile in the morning for load in).
One major puzzle piece was to sort out travel logistics for the Minneapolis crew, myself, Maribeth, Evelyn and Director of Photography Ben Enke – then we focused on hiring local Philadelphia crew personnel, working through location permitting, insurance details for the production, drafting a shoot schedule (we only had two hours with Carli on set!), finalizing creative decisions and so much more. There were many production meetings with the hired local crew to figure out the exact filming location within our soccer facility, the lighting, the gear needed, the props and wardrobe, the food to feed the crew and other pertinent logistics. A last minute creative decision was to bring on a team of young female soccer players to surround Carli as the advertisement wraps up. Acquiring children as talent is always a challenge, especially in a pinch. Our producing team divided and conquered, with me working on finishing up the production logistics and Evelyn lining up the girl soccer players.
After our scout of the indoor soccer field the day before our shoot, our crew was ready to capture the commercial content. The day of the shoot everyone arrived very early to setup and be ready for Carli before she arrived – she had a tight window to capture all her scenes and traveling home to get ready to fly out to be an analyst for the 2022 FIFA Men’s World Cup. The production day was mostly flawless, with each person on our crew contributing in their department to create a polished commercial.
Moving onto the post production, Maribeth and the Acorns creative team worked with Editor Collin Pittier to take our puzzle pieces and build the final video. After a sound mix from Nick at Cape Status, our last layer of polish was from Added Element’s Colorist extraordinaire, Co-Founder Corey Wipper. With some past Acorns creative as an example to work off, Corey was able to enhance the images, make sure our green jacket on Carli perfectly matched Acorns’ brand colors, and bring a final look to our vertical social video.
We are so proud to have been a part of this production and make this concept become a reality.
Client: Acorns
Executive Creative Director: Patrick Figueroa
Designer: Kat Mayhew
Writer: Ryan Haney
Production Company: Airplanes for Breakfast
Talent: Carli Lloyd
Production:
Director: Maribeth Romslo
Producer: Matthew Deery
Producer: Evelyn Sadowski
Field Producer: Jason Rudeen
Director of Photography: Ben Enke
Assistant Camera: Darby Irrgang
Audio Engineer: Jack Mehlbaum
Gaffer: Matt Bucolo
Grip: Alex Ramsey
Production Designer: Chris Jones
Art Assistant: Layla Marcelle
HMUA: Liz Yoon
Wardrobe Stylist: Jannelle Munro
Wardrobe Assistant: Hillary Zanylo
Production Assistant: Dubraska Sosa
Post Production:
Editor: Collin Pittier
Sound Design: Nick Mihalevich
Colorist: Corey Wipper
