Making the digital experience tangible.

10 sec spot: Escape

15 sec spot: Engaged

15 sec spot: Children’s Book

15 sec spot: Textbook

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ThriftBooks reached out to me in 2018. They were looking for an updated brand video to realign the perception of who they were as they soft-launched their new brand identity in 2019. Next to Amazon, they were the number one used book seller in the US, but customers didn’t know who they were outside a “just another easy online book retailer”.

I led my creative team through weeks of brainstorming and ideation. We generated mood boards, sketches, mapped out online retail experiences, and reviewed their customer data to develop a concept that brought warmth and authority to the idea of buying used books.

We had a budget of $30,000. Based on our creative, we knew it would be a tight fit to have that many talent, locations, and bookshelves fit into the budget – but we were determined.

Alongside my co-producer/creative director, we located and booked all 14 locations; casted all 18 talent (and negotiated usage rights with five of the agency talent); and built production outlines for each of the nine days that we shot.

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Production was a lot of moving parts across a three week period. We used Peerspace for locations, Airbnb’s, family member’s homes, and even our own office for the locations. However, there were some technically difficult sequences that required a lot of planning, coordination, and fabricating. To shoot everything as practical as possible and not rely on special effects, we built a rig to capture the scene at 00:14 seconds which connected the book directly to the camera for that slide in/out effect.

Our crew was super minimal. At most, we had five crew, but most of the time it was just three. We had to wear a lot of hats to ensure good lighting and staging. We were able to capture everything we needed across nine days, over a three week period. It required a lot of communication, planning, and “getting my hands dirty” to help make ends meet.

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Throughout my producing process, I’m always thinking about maximizing content for the client. With this shoot, we were able to generate four different ad sets using the footage in the video, and a/b/c scenes we shot in addition to what we needed for the brand video.

Editing took four weeks for the main brand video, and three weeks for the ad sets. I managed communication between our director/editor and the client; we staged all versions in Vimeo Review Pages.

We had one out-of-scope change request at the end that required a total reshoot of the scene with the book going into the bookcase, which added one week to our delivery but it was well within the timeline of launch.