A Sticky Situation

What began as a normal weekend quickly evolved into an extraordinary payoff for some work I'd done in the past. In one of my previous posts, I'd mentioned the WD-40 commercial I was fortunate enough to direct and produce. A few weeks ago, we got a call telling us that we had been nominated for an Addy, which is an award in advertising. It begins on a state level and if it wins, it gets forwarded to the regional level, then the national level. This weekend was the gala for the Utah level competition. We went as a group with high hopes of winning a Gold Addy. As the awards show went on, we finally arrived the our section. And we won gold! We were thrilled. Before the excitement had worn off, we came to the Best of Show awards. Much to our surprise, we won that too! The trophy was a golden dog bone for being the "top dogs." We were so stoked! We continued with the awards and the judges began handing out ballots for the Audience Choice award. We filled out our ballots and waited for the results. We couldn't believe it when they called out our project again! We swept the competition! The trophy for this award was pretty incredible. For the next year, we're the official keepers of an official WWF champion belt, signed by Brett "The Hit Man" Heart, a WWF wrestler. It was ridiculous, insane and so random. Here's a picture of our bounty. I'll also include a link below so you can view the commercial if you haven't had the chance to already.

Good things come to those who work hard!

An Experience with a Stranger, a Coke and an App

So this week we were encouraged to buy a stranger a coke and write about it in our blog. I admittedly bent some of the requirements, but I did so in attempt of making a more interesting blog post. For the past several weeks, I've been hearing talk of a new dating app called Tinder. The app essentially functions as follows: If two people are physically attracted to each other's pictures, Tinder allows for the participants to engage in dialogue. Should the parties choose, they could arrange a time to meet and begin a real life relationship. Or something. I decided that it would make a good story if I got Tinder and used it for homework, which is exactly what I did. I downloaded the app and began to superficially sift through local girls' photos. Within just a few minutes, I began getting matches. So I struck up a conversation with a few of them. In my opinion, one girl was clearly more interesting than the others. We'll call her Annalee. I chose that name mostly because that's her name. After facebook stalking her (a necessary practice to ensure she isn't an axe murderer), we set up a meeting time. Because both of us rock climb and try to maintain some degree of healthy, neither of us drink soda, thereby necessitating the first bending of the rules. I was liberal with my interpretation of the term "coke" and took it down a notch, choosing coke's gateway drug: frozen yogurt. We met and it was chill in every sense. Once the frozen yogurt shop closed up,we decided we would continue talking and migrated to my car. Steamy. Actually it really was. The defrost feature in my car is useless so I had to wipe the windows down once we parted ways. Although this activity was geared toward encouraging charity and brotherly kindness, I somehow managed to contort it to fill my own dating needs. I'm not really sure what to say about that. But I'm sure if you gave it enough though, you could find something that it says about me. Mazel tov.

Brain Saver

Right after finishing my submission to the Student Emmys, I had to shift my attention to the aforementioned commercials class. Although we made the WD-40 commercial over the course of the semester, the professor this semester decided we would be making a commercial due January 22. The reason for this is that the advertising program has a ‘meet and greet’ of sorts with industry professionals in Park City during Sundance Film Festival. The professor realized how valuable it would be for the students to have a commercial in their portfolios to show these recruiters, thus the urgency. This commercial, which is for Brainsaver helmets, was an interesting experience to shoot. The group wanted slow motion footage of fruit exploding at skate parks, but to truly capture the impressive nature of an explosion, we needed to shoot at a higher frame rate than 300 frames per second, which is what the school’s high-end camera shoots at. Luckily for us, we were able to develop a relationship with the BYU Splash Lab, which recently bought a camera called a Phantom. This camera is capable of shooting half a million frames per second, which really messes with your perception of reality. Although the shots in the final commercial are usually only 8,000 frames per second, we played around with the camera and found out firsthand how incredible it is. Hope you enjoy the commercial! https://vimeo.com/84569385 The password is: BrainBuster

A Sticky Situation

Another film project I’ve been devoting time to lately is our WD-40 commercial. We recently found out that this project won an Addy, which is an award for commercials. The Addys work at a state, regional and national level. The gala for the state Addys is this upcoming Saturday and we have high hopes for the commercial. If we win at the state level, we’ll automatically be forwarded for competition with other winners in the region. I was fortunate enough to make this commercial through a commercials class in the Ad program here at BYU. Every semester, they recruit directors from the film program to assist in the production of the commercial. Having these commercials is a significant asset in each of the ad students’ portfolios. I was fortunate enough to get paired up with James Taylor, Brian Shaw and Brandon Robinson on this project. As a general rule, I’m skeptical of advertising students. I’ve just had a lot of negative experiences with several advertisers. However, I was able to develop a really great friendship with these three gentlemen during the experience. Hope you enjoy the commercial! https://vimeo.com/80596323

MCOM 320 Introduction

Hi there. My name is Nick Dixon and I’m honestly not really much of a blogger, which is why I’m recycling a blog from a previous class to do this assignment. I may not be much of a blogger, but that doesn’t mean I won’t have a little bit of fun with this assignment. I honestly don’t anticipate I’ll blog after school requires me to do it, but I can honestly say that I don’t hate blogging in the slightest. I just don’t necessarily get it either. But maybe I will after writing a blog consistently this semester! You’ll notice that this blog post is about a month late. There’s a sort-of-good-but-not-really excuse behind that, which segues beautifully to the subject that I’ll be devoting this blog to: my film life. January 14 was the deadline for a draft of my capstone film, Without a Rope. It’s a 20-minute piece about two brothers. Porter, the older brother, is an experienced rock climber, while Rick struggles living up to the example his brother sets. When they get in a plane crash on the way home from a climbing trip, Rick has to decide between waiting in safety to get found and climbing out of the valley (without a rope) to save his brother before he bleeds to death. To prove that I’m not just blowing smoke up your skirt, here are a few screenshots of the film. We’ve been working on it since the submission so we can submit an even better version if we make the first cut. Hopefully I’ll be writing more about this in future posts!