Beef and Pie

We put Karen in the background of a lot of commercials, but this one we put her front and center.

A lot of Machete was shot at this house.

It never made the cut but Mega’s sweatshirt lights up MW on the back. Mike Woolf took it home.

This was originally scripted as a squirrel that runs out and takes the ball away.  Turns out we didn’t have the time – and squirrels don’t have the brain size – to train one.  Karen, got inspired and contacted our animal trainer friends in rural Texas. They offered up a cougar.  Not just any cougar but the one that was in Talladega Nights!  They started training the cougar to walk in, pick up a golf ball and walk off.  (used a lot of raw meat I heard). Anyway, the agency decided that a hawk would be funnier.  We shrugged our shoulders and said, okay, we’ll train a hawk.  This one “flew” in from LA.  First class no less.  Nailed it on the first take.  Much smarter than a squirrel.  But we’ll always have a whole in our comedy hearts where that cougar could have been.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve gotten that Death card playing blackjack.  I’m not much of a bowler (sober) but when the camera is rolling on a close up of the pins and Andrew is yelling “bowl bowl bowl!” I always seem to nail it. One take baby.

Shovels and rakes full of plastic balls.  Ready, aaaaaand action!

How did we do it? I honestly don’t remember.

Stuff that didn’t make the cut:

As he’s showing us his equipment he out his curved Ghurkha knife. Someone says, “It’s filthy, what’s on there?” “Blood.” he replies.

On his last mission to an undisclosed location he was “inserted” behind enemy lines via a torpedo chamber on a nuclear sub.

Favorite move in a bar fight?  The Head-Butt.

Para Jumpers are the ones standing by at Space Shuttle launches in case the mission is aborted during launch and the astronauts are jettisoned into the ocean.

There was a lot of talk about PJ’s vs. Nave Seals. We kept trying to arrange some kind of Thunderdome square off.  But nobody listens to us…. then again, why would you? We can’t Halo Jump onto a film set and stop a sucking chest wound.

Who keeps track of the 20,000 man-made objects orbiting Earth?  This guy!  And for the record we did go to space and shoot the satellites colliding.

50 thousand still frames.  7000 die on a 144X78 grid.  13 hours of shooting. 6 hours of RED footage.  One massage for Matt who did the dice turning.

The A is real.  Very real.  We don’t get all Peter Jackson fancy over at Beef and Pie. The story calls for a big A, we make a big A.

This remotely piloted aircraft can see that my driver’s license is expired from 20,000 feet.

This was an awesome spot to make.  We got to shoot in the Driskell, The Paramount Theater and an emergency room.  It’s also got cameos galore – the Usher was just off the set of the Coen’s No Country for Old Men.  Our PA Lindsey was the dying patient. Beefy’s cousin and art department lackey was a nurse and yes, that is Poppa Beef – Howard Woolf – trying to not look at the camera behind Farmer Charlie. And stupid me missed Karen in the Opera Box.

What a blast.  We’re having a wedding!!  We got to pick the guestlist (70 Austin extras – most of which showed up bathed), the bride (Amber – one of our all time favorites) the caterer (2dine4 – okay they are often our caterer) and the church was right off of I35.

For years we’ve been shooting with The Tombras Group – and for years our spots have been edited by Brent Farwick from Karma.  For this 7 spot campaign that we shot in Austin we flew Brent in so he could help with continuity and drink a lot of Shiner. There’s no question the spots get better when the editor is part of the process and not just handed the footage.  Thanks Brent.

Oh yeah, well we’re in advertising and can present something real good! Damn superheros…..

Cameras cameras everywhere. This was the day that almost did us in.  Andrew on steadycam, Mike in the bush with the “insurgents” Wilson on timelapse, handheld, steadycam who know what he was doing, Schwartz (Candy) had the RED going all day and a lipstick cam kept getting taped to people.  I guess it all worked out.  All I remember was at about 3pm finishing an interview with an Airman where the sweat was just rolling off his face like a hose. I turned around and looked at our crew, just ghosts of humans, blank eyes, couldn’t even take the effort to sweat anymore.  No one even perked up at “icy cold Starbucks Doubleshot.” It was a wrap.

If you know anyone with serious heart disease they should really look into EECP.  This is the real deal.  We’re not doctors – just advertising people who think we know everything.  And this is making a difference in people’s lives.  Basically it is a non-invasive heart therapy. For seven weeks, one hour a day, your heart is “pumped for you” using huge compression socks on your legs.  Basically it exercises the heart without putting stress on it. This give the heart a chance to grow capillaries around the diseased areas.  The results have been impressive.

Michael Gratch is the man behind Legacy Heart Care and it was a great experience working directly with him to make this campaign. We felt good about helping spread the word about such a revolutionary heart therapy – and we felt a little less guilty about going into advertising vs. med school way back when….

Sometimes you just get lucky.  This wasn’t on anyone’s schedule. We ran over a minute before the run started, grabbed interviews out of the crowd, kept the cameras rolling and caught some moments that captured the spirit of the Airmen’s Run. For the record that was some of Andrew’s best interviewing skills.

This ad is all Mike Coffin.  He had the vision.  Get some killer black and white shots of the down and dirty men who work the heavy equipment – and put it to the Merle Haggard song Working Man Blues. We couldn’t afford the actual song so we asked Austin legend Dale Watson to cut a version.  Of course it’s perfect.  Whats more Redd Volkart (Merle’s lead guitarist for decades) played the track with Dale and gave us this little tidbit.  That random “hit” was a drumstick hitting a coke bottle.

Who let us do this for Chase Bank?! Cross dressing? Creepy Uncle Jimmy. Affected child-man with giant lollypop?

I love these spots. I forgot how much.  But when you get to custom rig a huge chrome smoker with rims how can you not be happy?  And putting Sean the actor in a pink shirt under a pink canopy with a pink teddy bear was fun.  So was the mini grill shot. Only bummer was that we didn’t get to keep the grill.  Just the apron.

This is movie making magic through and through. The smoke billowing when he spots the 6-fingered gnome, seeing him spot it in the reflection, the fact that the gnome actually has 6 fingers. No detail goes un-dorked when it comes to Beef and Pie.  Not even the detailed drawings of the elusive gnome.  Now who got the I HEART GNOMES t-shirt?

For this round of Farmer Charlie spots there was a huge cast – at least 30 principles for five spots.  For this specific commercial we’d cast a large group of extras to chase Charlie around the McCoy’s Hardware Store. We just figured two or three of them could deliver the line “Charlie’s here?” How hard could that be?  Wellllllll, turns out it was nearly impossible. Two people utterly failed and we were getting nervous. There was an actor trying to pull out a plank of wood and deliver the line. It was so bad Andrew snapped.  He told the guy to just get out of frame and said, “Beefy just go in there and do it.”  Nailed it on the first take.

Which, a year later, led to a very random phone call from a friend of Mike’s in the Nashville airport – drunk.  He’s watching TV at the airport bar and SWEARS he sees him in an insurance commercial.

This was part of a much larger fundraising film for the University of Texas. We got unprecedented access to this notoriously difficult campus to film on.  It was also an early opportunity to show people that the RED was capable of 35mm imagery.

This was our first shoot with our Red camera – Oct of 2008.

The lead in this is no actor – just a student from St. Edwards. We had him on a stationary bike on a process trailer pushing a camera inches from his face.  We kept saying he looked like a young Dustin Hoffman.

We really liked working with Seth and Carter because they seemed to have such startling insight into teenage girls and what they would have in their treasure box.

Real cop. Real scary.

She really could be an actor. She was just a sweet, patient person as she sat in the car while we tweaked lighting.  Then she put on the cop face and all our butts got tight.

For this spot, we said, let’s try the direct approach.

Oh the things you learn on a shoot. Early in the day our makeup artist pulled me aside and said we needed to talk.  When she asked Josh to take off his shirt to start painting his body blue she had to stop.  ”Turns out he’s really really hairy – front and back,” she says. “So what do we do?” I say.  ”Well we need to shave him.” “Uh, okay” I say. “Who’s going to ask?” she says. “Not my department,” I say.

The creative team made a cool website  www.bennychastain.com check it out and please follow the action as he tries to make his dream come true.

And you can follow him on Facebook. http://www.facebook.com/bennychastain

This was one of those spots that keeps a creative hooked in the biz.  Christian and Mike, wired on Intelligencia coffee at Frank (yes it makes you smarter), came up with this ridiculously simply split :15 campaign for Freebirds – Christians brand new client.  There was little money, a tight deadline and a new client.  They approved the spot over the phone, we shot the spot the next week with a crew of 5. It was on the air a week later and Free Taco Tuesday was a huge hit.  It reminded all of us why it can be so much fun to make advertising.

Oh, and what about that screamer? Marcus got free burritos for a year for this performance.

I wish more people would bring airhorns to golf tournaments.

Who doesn’t love fake Alligators?  Well actually it scared the piss out of everyone here because we forgot we threw it in the yard behind the studio.

Throwing mud in actor’s faces is really quite fun.  Throwing mud in anyone’s face is fun.

Ah the ole’ “Ferris Bueller look one way drive the other trick.”

It was a freaking cold night in Austin.

Ballerinas don’t wear much or have any body fat to keep them warm.

Due to our tiny (partially drunk) crew and the fact the ballerina was freezing her tu-tu off we only got a couple takes per set up.

The commercial plays on the big screen at the Long Center before each performance.

Whiskey keeps you warm.

Oh yes, that’s cameraman, grip, electric and now actor Wilson Waggoner.

A year back the US Air Force become a sponsor of the #43 Nascar. But they didn’t just want to put their logo on a car – so they created a campaign where the two would switch seats.  So the driver an Air For ce pilot would get behnid the wheel of the #43 car and Reed Sorenson would fly an F16.  That was cool but it went much deeper than that. Nascar pit crews would swap seats with the airmen on the flight line. So the dude who changes tires in the race pits would get to see what it takes to change a tire on a fighter jet.  And vice versa.  We filmed everything from the F-16 flight line to the heart of Nascar in Charlotte, NC.

This was very very docu-style.  Very fly on the wall.  We followed the action and let it unfold.  Very few set-up interviews. It was a blast to make on and off camera.  Some off camera highlights: Toasting Mr. Bones with Jeremiah Weed / the impromptu (and very dangerous) ride around the race track in Reed’s rental car / the Down The Hatch bar across the highway from the hotel.

Wally had been writing these Dash spots for TXDOT to talk about getting TxTags for the tollroads.  He always appeared on the Dash board.  Get it?  Then TxDot said that so many people got TxTags they were actually getting rid of cash as an option on TX tollways.  So, really there was no need for Dash anymore. So we wrote a spot where he gets fired and then in this one he gets a new job at a coffee shop.  Beef and Pie – shooting in a coffee shop – who’d of thought of that??

This kid was making us laugh all afternoon.  Not sure if it was the passion he brought to the performance or the fever he was running.  He gave it all every take.

This was also one of those spots that was fun to cast. The script played funny every way it was read.

It’s fun to fire a puppet.

We talked about CGI-ing his mouth but we thought that would lose some of the ridiculousness of this bobblehead in a real situation. Of course it made bobbing the head a pain in the ass. This also stars one of our favorite actors, Jennifer.  This was one of the only times she played both the English and Spanish lead.  Go Jennifer!

Let’s cut to the chase – that is a new baby.  Really new.  Like 14 hours old.  That’s what you get when roll with Beef and Pie. We go right into that hospital and get you a nursery and a baby.  Sure sure we had our doubts. We figured we’d got one a few days old or a few weeks.  We just knew we w0uldn’t go the animatronic route.  Or put a toddler in there and hope people thought it was a baby.  Karen worked with the hospital, found a new mom, induced her the night before the shoot, delivered it and brought it to set.  Karen goes the extra mile!!!

That catchy original score is courtesy of  Lil’ Capt’n Travis.

Next time you are seeing double in Baltimore visit the good Doctor Woolfs.  www.drwoolf.com

At one point there were 6 people in the garage waiting to be interviewed and I asked how they knew each other. Knew each other?!?!  None of them had ever met.

Follow Benny at www.bennychastain.com

Now that’s an udder shot! A little Kevin Russell music and hey, that’s Dale Watson’s as the VO.

We actually filmed this piece the year before. It’s funny, you can really see the quality of the cameras improve over the course of a year.  Andrew attached a camera to his head and ran the course with them for bit. He wasn’t allowed to take the rope across the water or at least that’s what he said!

LT was one of the most professional, friendly and confident athletes we worked with. Not like Andy Roddick.  He had a scary pitbull named “Sweetness” of course.

These shoots are so fast and furious – 6 hours with the stars, 4 AT&T products and a whole house to shoot – so it’s hard to give Deion and the star the time to sit, chat and create moments that aren’t scripted.  Especially since Prime’s typical reaction after we said cut was “that was a great one! Let’s move on!” That said I remember the conversation these two had in LT’s secret room were some of the most natural of the entire series.

You get spoiled after a few days on an Air Force base.  It’s pretty sweet when you can choose what aircraft you want as your backdrop – the C-130 cargo plane or a fighter jet. This also has our favorite landing gear b-roll shot. See the site in action here. http://www.airforce.com/opportunities/enlisted/technical-training/

These are some of the most physically fit people we’ve ever been around. To show them we were a serious film crew that shouldn’t be messed with – we did most of these interviews shirtless.  What struck us most was going to the pool to scout this and watching all of them do laps in full uniforms. We also got to film the airmen being “drownproofed.” Oh yes.  This is where they bind the airmen’s hands and legs and they have to swim laps and tread water.  Andrew was so excited about our underwater helmet cam he jumped in with them and started filming.  He cracked a rib on the way out.

This was challenging.  We have to film these kids who are learning languages. We can’t show what they are working on on their computer screens.  They can’t talk about what they do with their language skills since it is classified. There isn’t much to film visually since they just listen on headphones and type on their computers.  I think Andrew did a killer job making some boring classrooms look high-tech. And these airmen were very articulate in English and Farsic.

While Will has always played drums for Monsters of Folk he officially became a “monster” last fall.

Pizza was from Hoboken Pies.

The wine was cheap.

That is Andrew Yates as the “janitor.”

On the weekend they were trying to pick a voice over talent the YouTube Voice Over guy storm hit. So for a couple of days there was the possibility that he (or James Earl Jones) would be the talent.  Neither worked out.  Turns out Darth Vader is VERY expensive.

He’s not spelling his name wrong – he’s actually Dutch – hence the funny Andruw.

This was the first shoot we did after Andrew took out a deer on his motorcycle. This was the happiest we has ever seen Deion once he laid eyes on “the sweetest Pie I ever had.”

We has so little clue what we were getting ourselves into we didn’t have an AD on the shoot and Beefy and Adam Schwatrz shared a hotel room.

Is that Laura Carter?  Oh yes it is.

These were very difficult plays to shoot in. Basically it was just white rooms, low ceilings and computer monitors that we couldn’t show because they were “top secret.” So there was a lot of down time while Andrew was working hard to fill the frame with decent images. During one of these I was talking to one of the students about the power of the satellite images.  I said,  ”Okay, really.  How close up can you see and image from space?” Seconds later our client “The General” was on the set.  Even without the cameras rolling these are NOT the questions you ask.

Big Mike is currently a professional arm wrestler, a past professional wrestler and has some crazy ass tattoos. We spend a few hours painting over his arms but left the one on his head.

He threw himself to the floor at least 20 times.

We had a lot of practical flashes going off but Brandon doubled the amount in post.

One of those flashes caused a fire on set. Photo pending…

The BBQ bus catered. Damn fine ribs.

Who is the cameo?  That would be Anna Yates as the role of the “curly bright blond extra” doing a walk through.

The first time we worked with Josh we removed hair – this time we added hair.  What’s next?

CPS decided they needed to have an interview with a line repairman, to show how hard these guys work to keep everybody on line.  And so it was that Mike and Andrew found themselves wedged – with a fully-rigged Red Camera and tripod – in a cherry picker , high above the power-lines, interviewing a repairman in another cherry picker. Let’s just say we are lucky to both be relatively svelte of body…it was a little tight up there. Did we mention it was summer? In San Antonio?

After spending two hours in the room with the Tesla Ball – two of our Red cameras went down. Spooooky.

The cameo is the voice of the Beef.

John appeared in the very first TV campaign we ever filmed as Beef and Pie.  Check it out here!

Bill was one of the leads in Dan Browns seminal film American Detective.  Per usual, his character is a little off his nut and for the scene inside Bill’s house Dan felt that my house would be the perfect location.  Thanks Dan!

That’s our buddy Davis Tucker who was buried up to his neck. He’s a favorite actor of ours and not just because he’s an avid cyclist and owns Red’s Porch.  No camera trickery here.  Just a couple of shovels and PA’s to dig a hole.  

Cameo?  Karen.

And how do you keep a giant sandcastle from crumbling in a windstorm overnight? Lots of Elmers Glue.  From a spray bottle…..

Craig was recording in the same studio with the same producer who records Spoon.  PS. it’s dump.

The artwork for the cover is an actual flag designed by Christian and sewn by his sister-in-law.  If you are interested in some of the coolest custom flags visit Standard Grit.

This is the first video that we’ve done with Craig but Christian designed The Hold Steady’s last album and Andrew did the cool photography for it.  Check it out here.