There is no shortage of people having epic meltdowns on
YouTube these days. You’ve got the guy who smashes his Xbox to bits
because someone calls him fat, the eHarmony girl whose love of cats sets
her off on a crying jag and the minor league baseball coach who
famously freaks out on an umpire, rips a base off the diamond, and hurls
it across the field.
As distressed as these people are on YouTube, we see them in a
different light in “Sunny Side,” a Volkswagen Super Bowl pre-game spot
released on YouTube. Created by Deutsch L.A. and directed by MJZ’s The
Perlorian Brothers (the directing duo of Michael Gelfand and Ian Letts),
the video gathers the real people behind the Internet’s most famous
freakouts, including the three mentioned above, and plunks them down in a
field where they frolic holding hands, smiling and basking in joy while
listening to Jimmy Cliff singing The Partridge Family’s “C’mon, Get
Happy.”
“Since Volkswagen has always been a brand that champions positivity and happiness--last year, we did a brand spot where people just laughed all the way through the spot,
from babies to nonagenarians, and signed off with the line, ‘It’s not
the miles, it’s how you live them’—we saw an opportunity for Volkswagen
to do something relevant and compelling by transforming the most notable
YouTube cranks with some uniquely positive Volkswagen vibes,” says
Deutsch executive vice president and group creative director Matt Ian.
That said, Ian and his partner Michael Kadin were hesitant to move
forward with “Sunny Side” when Deutsch creatives Mark Peters and Brian
Friedrich first brought the concept to them. “We were well aware of all
the negativity and vitriol online in social media. How could we not be
after living through the last election? But we questioned how many
compelling videos we could actually find online to illustrate this
trend. However, ten minutes of Googling search terms like ‘meltdown,’
‘temper tantrum’ and ‘freakout’ uncovered an epidemic. We weren’t making
this problem up,” Ian remarks. “Publicly going to pieces is a
legitimate cultural trend.”
When it came to casting, a couple of the YouTube tantrum throwers
were, not surprisingly, difficult to deal with. “I do know that I was on
the phone late with our producers the night before the shoot trying to
figure out how to get a couple of people [to the shoot] who had agreed,
then backed out, then reconsidered, then backed out again. It wasn’t as
amusing as it was completely enraging, and if someone were filming me on
the phone that evening, I might have wound up in the video myself,” Ian
says, adding, “Ultimately, the people I am referring to didn’t end up
in the video anyway, and honestly, I don’t miss them. Michael [Kadin]
and I really love who we ended up with. Everyone was great.”
“Sunny Side” was shot in Thousand Oaks, California, at Ventura Farms.
“Everyone who came to be in the video was really positive and psyched
to be there, but as for getting in a ‘happy place,’ it was a bit tougher
than expected. The two days we shot on that hillside were two of the
coldest friggin’ days I’ve ever felt in Southern California,” Ian says.
“We were all freezing. It was in the thirties when we showed up, and
people were huddling around portable heaters between takes. I felt bad
for the talent. They couldn’t bundle up in jackets for this thing.”
Cara Hartmann, aka “the crazy cat-hugging lady,” probably suffered
the most. She had to wear what she was wearing in her YouTube video: a
tank top and pajama bottoms. “But if you look at the shots she is in,
she’s got a smile on her face the entire time,” Ian notes. “She was a
trooper.”
So was the shoot like some freaky YouTube reunion? “I’d imagine they
did recognize one another. I mean, most of them have had mega hit
tallies on YouTube, numbers we advertising types would kill for,” Ian
says. “I think most of the people on the crew recognized them, too.
Michael and I can specifically remember seeing each one of their videos
when they broke. I shared the Green Bay fan video--Casey Lewis with her
bad luck sparkly nail polish--in every conceivable social media channel I
could.”
Prior to shooting the spot, Deutsch went into the recording studio
with Jimmy Cliff to lay down a new version of “C’Mon, Get Happy.” While
Ian and the creative team loved the song, they were worried that The
Partridge Family’s original version might be too over-the-top happy for
“Sunny Side.” “So we wanted someone to give it a little more of an edge.
Jimmy Cliff immediately popped to mind. We love Jimmy Cliff. The guy is
the real deal, a living legend. I remember seeing him as a kid in 1986
at the Capital Theater in Port Chester, New York, and him blowing the
roof off the joint,” Ian says. “We felt Jimmy had the cred, the style
and the voice to take that Partridge Family theme and really make it
his. But even we were surprised by how f-cking cool the song turned out.
Watching Jimmy walk into the Brooklyn recording studio of Vel Records,
nail the song in like two takes and blow us all away was something to
behold.”
For now, the plan is for “Sunny Side” to run on YouTube only,
although that could change. “Last year, we intended to do the same with
our pre-release spot, ‘The Bark Side,’ but then ended up running that on
TV as a sixty second. So who knows?” Ian says.
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