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Anti Drug Pictures

VENICE, CA -- Making a testimonial commercial visually engaging is not an easy task But even more difficult, as most parents of teenagers will agree, is forming a convincing message about the dangers of drugs aimed at young adults without preaching or talking down to them. Add to this the difficulty of creating a successful campaign from concept to completion entirely under one roof.

In response to the growing popularity of Ecstasy, the Partnership for a Drug-Free America (PDFA) enlisted 25-year-old director Adam Reed of recently formed production company/post house Elsewhere, here in Venice, to conceive, direct and design the first PDFA campaign focusing solely on this dangerous drug. With help from Elsewhere designer/editor T.J. Webber and producers Ethan Wolvek and Gary Kout, Reed created one of the most powerful anti-drug campaigns to date.

The first four spots, which began airing in February focus on Danielle, a 20-year-old who died after taking Ecstasy for only the third time. Three spots, Jim, Elsa and Jim and Elsa, feature Danielle's parents speaking of their loss. In the other spot, Coroner, the medical examiner describes the autopsy he performed on Danielle.

Coroner and Jim and Elsa employ a mosaic design that divides the screen into a series of rectangular boxes. Footage of the woeful testimonials fade in and out from box to box, with photos of a vibrantly alive Danielle filling the other sections. Scanned text taken from the coroner's report is superimposed on this design. Together with designer/editor Webber at Elsewhere, Reed formulated this mosaic design which afforded him the latitude to keep a slow, solemn pace to the spots while showing many images. In contrast, Jim and Elsa are simple documentary style spots, with each parent discussing their regrets, without incorporating additional images.

HOW IT STARTED

Two years ago, Reed first learned about the Director's Project, a partnership between the PDFA and the Association of Independent Commercial Producers to allow directors to create agency-free campaigns based on their own vision The project intrigued Reed for both professional and personal reasons. As a young director with mostly comedy spec spots on his reel, Reed wanted to prove that he was not just a comedy director but that he could handle a project involving intense emotional content, But more significant than his aspirations as a director Reed was motivated to pursue this project by his younger brother a drug addict who is currently serving a two-year jail sentence for possession."

Reed applied to the PDFA, but the directors had already been selected for that year: The selected directors were all seasoned helmers in the commercial industry, but that didn't deter the newcomer: Dorea Steedman, director of pro bono creative development, was so impressed with Reed's persistence and personal attachment to the PDFA's mission that last fall they awarded the Ecstasy campaign to this relatively unknown young director: "They knew their target audience was younger and they wanted someone that was younger and could get people to open up about their Ecstasy use," recalls Reed,

This was just the start of Reed's challenges, as he was thrust into the role of agency creative director and producer with two weeks to present a script, complete with people to deliver testimonials. He found the subjects via an Internet support site for families affected by this drug and interviewed a number of families including the parents of Danielle. The parents, Jim and Elsa, were still emotionally devastated and Reed knew immediately that, tragically, they were the right spokespeople for the campaign. "When I walked in their house they had her ashes with candles and pictures in the living room and Jim actually introduced me to Danielle," Reed recalls. "I knew at that point that it was going to be brutally emotional."

THE GRAPHIC STORY

Reed struggled to find a way to translate the family's story into a compelling commercial that would effectively speak to the younger generation most likely to experiment with this drug. "It was difficult to come up with the treatment," relates Reed. "I knew they wanted a testimonial but I had to find a way to have her life play out on screen while these other people talked about her:"

In Coroner, photos of Danielle as a baby a smiling girl and a beautiful teenager fade in and out of boxes while the coroner methodically reads his report "I wanted to have her life play out on screen while the coroner describes his job and basically describes her as a piece of meat," says Reed. A majority of the interviews were shot on DV, though 16mm was used for the extreme close-ups.

Webber explains that the mosaic design allowed for a more subdued style of telling the story than intercutting between images of her and the footage of her parents and the coroner: "Adam didn't want to have images flashing on screen because it would become this noxious, busy environment with your eye traveling all over the screen like MTV while the coroner or the parents are telling this sad story," relates Webber. "So we just wanted to fade between the images so it didn't conflict with what was being said."

In formulating the mosaic design for Coroner and Jim and Elsa, Reed took advantage of working at a company that also reps post production artists. "I like the fact that I can work with editors and designers from the very beginning and take it all the way to the end," says Reed. "The good thing with T.J. being right here is we could actualize the concept quickly. Had he not been here, I don't know if I would have been confident that this mosaic idea would have worked."

The mosaic design was cut in Avid's Media Composer and each clip was exported and composited with Adobe After Effects on a Mac G4. "It was a little difficult because Media Composer is a realtime editing system where you can cut and view and create a rhythm with it," explains Webber; "After Effects is not realtime, so you have to make it, eyeball it and render it and develop the rhythm by counting frames."

The remaining three spots in the Ecstasy campaign are about to go into post and will focus on two different stories. One shows a teenager that has done so much Ecstasy that he has severe brain damage and is serving a year in a juvenile hall. The other centers on a 20-year-old woman that sold Ecstasy and is now remorseful for what she did to her family and the people to whom she supplied the drug. Although the spots will have a similar mosaic design, Reed says that some full screen images will be incorporated. "With the kid that's in juvenile hall, there are some really powerful images of him being shackled and put into his cell, and I want to be able to show what his life has been reduced to," says Reed.

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