The Home Depot Movers Production
Trade School Custom Production for The Home Depot | November 2022
A key area The Home Depot has tasked Trade School with is helping consumers know they can come to The Home Depot to tackle both big and small tasks at the project level. One of the key project audiences is built around Moving and everything that comes with it: what you need to do before you move, the move itself, and those finishing touches you do after you’ve moved in. Trade School did one Movers shoot in late 2021 and built a solid content library for The Home Depot’s Movers campaigns… BUT… it had some “holes” that needed to be filled. In September 2022, our team was kicked off on creating more content to fill those holes!
Then there was the “last-minute add-on project.”
We were well underway on all of our concepts for the planned Movers shoot… and then were thrown a curveball specifically targeting Renters and First-Time Homeowners using social-first Creative, i.e. content made for Reels, Snapchat and TikTok. I had come from all-social teams both at Publicis and Wunderman Thompson, so this was an ask well within my comfort zone… even at the eleventh hour.
We had our storylines pretty much set already for the main videos, so now we had to develop concepts that could be shot with the same talent and using the same props / SKUs.
We brought in a second director/DP—Daniel Oramas—just to shoot the TikTok videos; and Jasmine and Ben accompanied him the entire time since his feed wasn’t being broadcast into video village. Without the two of them supervising the social-first shoot, we never would have gotten all the content shot.
*Alex was part of a layoff at Trade School in October 2022, at which point I took over all Creative Direction for the production.
Moving can be stressful, and The Home Depot can reduce the stress with how-to guides, project calculators, moving supplies and more.
• Renters want to feel inspired to take on rental-friendly projects to personalize their space and make it their own
• First-Time Homeowners want to feel successful in taking on their first home projects themselves
• Experienced Owners want to feel successful in taking on move-out or move-in projects
• Active Adults want to feel confident in letting The Home Depot’s trusted, local, licensed pros help them make updates to their new home
Integrating authentic storytelling into the Moving journey makes the “project” of Moving relatable to every audience.
We were given specific “Moving projects” to feature to fill the gaps from the previous library shoot (like buying a new washer and dryer for a first home), so getting the stories of those projects flushed out became our priority.
An occasional high five at the end of a project was OK, but we didn’t want the stories we told to feel trite or expected. Our Movers needed to feel like real people.
Growing homeownership from multicultural audiences meant we could cast the widest array of talent ever for a library shoot. I tried very hard to get a same-sex couple cast as either one of the sets of Renters (hey, they could be roommates versus lovers, right?) or as our First-Time Homeowners. We almost (ALMOST!) got a Black lesbian couple cast as the First-Time Homeowners installing the doggy door. It didn’t work out on this shoot, but it’s only a matter of time before I can make that happen.
To feel more intimate and less staged, we wanted everything shot on a shoulder rig. This would be a slight mismatch from the previously-shot Movers content from 2021, but it was a risk the clients were willing to take to add authenticity to the videos.
We had seventeen videos to concept across four audiences: Renters, First-Time Homeowners, Experienced Owners, and “Active Adults” (a category name that really means, “Senior Citizens with enough money to pay someone to do everything for them versus DIY’ing it”). Each audience had multiple stages of Moving and our videos had to be able to represent more than one stage potentially.
All of our stories were laid out so they could work as 00:15 spots independently or be cut down to 00:06 bumpers or ~00:07 “splits” we could daisy-chain together into a 00:15 spot.
Trade School was tasked with coming up with a shot list for Stills and overseeing that punch list, but Alderman (now Studio Orange) would be shadow-shooting and doing the post-production for those in tandem with The Home Depot’s Creative Services team.
A month out from filming, our clients added eight “social-first” executions to the list of deliverables… on top of the 17 videos we had already concepted, scripted and cast talent for. It involved a whole new workstream and separate director!
These videos were targeted specifically at our Renters and First-Time Homeowners audiences, and we concepted and shot four for each.
We wanted these videos to feel like they fit in on TikTok, so in the end we provided two versions of each to the clients for some A/B testing of the content. The “A” versions were all blank to allow the overlay text / supers to be added natively in-platform at activation; and the “B” versions had supers built-in using The Home Depot’s core brand colors (but still feeling platform-endemic). Below are a mix of both the blank and built-in supers videos.
Another consideration we had was using The Home Depot’s “Beat” (or equity track) against the same video with platform-provided, brand-safe music. Jasmine listened to HOURS of music to choose the alternate versions.
I was originally assigned to this project by Alex to drive concepting with a mostly “young” team who hadn’t done a library shoot before. Jonathon had, of course, but it had been a while due to his other agency duties and he couldn’t be the day-to-day lead on the project. Alex was going to present the work in every meeting and be our on-set agency Creative representative for shoot days. We were all told to block the week of production “just in case,” but we probably wouldn’t be needed (nor could the project’s scope support the hours for all of us to be there.)
Then Alex was let go as part of a larger layoff in October 2022… and I found out ten minutes into a meeting where he was supposed to be presenting our latest round of concepts. So I jumped in and did it… and ran the project from then on out.
On top of concepting, I led selection of directors, SKUs, talent and locations—and was also partially responsible for instigating an ugly sweater day on December 1, 2022.
During post-production when that kicked off in January 2023, I became the key agency Creative representative presenting all of the work to the clients and established myself as the content expert over what we had shot and produced.
After post-production, I had the additional role of overseeing development of ALL final digital content alongside Jasmine and Ben. This included units for META, Nextdoor, Pinterest, YouTube, Snapchat, online display banners, digital audio, and rich media units (note: notice that TikTok wasn’t on the original final list… the content we shot for TikTok was used on Reels and Snapchat instead because of the security debacle with the U.S. government and TikTok going on at the time). The full library of content we shot has been layered in with the original Movers content shot in 2021 and has been used ever since.
Both Ben and I had been on the team that concepted the original launch of The Home Depot’s TikTok channel, so I was really glad to have him on this project because he knew the background of what the clients were trying to achieve using TikTok and other social channels. Plus, he’s really funny and we were given free rein to have a lot more fun with these videos than we could have in the seventeen main videos being filmed.
For that reason, I FOUGHT to get Ben and Jasmine on-set for the days we were filming our Renters and First-Time Homeowner content. Even if they couldn’t bill every hour to the project itself, it was valuable experience for both of them to get to be on set and influence the content they had worked so hard on.
In the end, it was a moot point, as they became essential as Daniel was doing his run-and-gun shooting behind the main crew. There is no way I could have been running the main shoot from video village and supervising the TikTok shoot.
So my biggest contribution after initial concepting and storyboarding was on the post-production side making sure every video was as tight as possible and met the delivery deadline.
25
Total videos made up of
17
Vignettes / Mini Stories and
8
TikTok / Reels / Snapchat ads for
4
audiences over
4
days of shooting at
3
locations featuring
12
talented actors and
2
Adorable dogs
Renters want to feel inspired to take on rental-friendly projects to personalize their space and make it their own.
One of our tasks showing any Smart Home products was displaying the Hubspace app’s capabilities. Our featured male talent wanted a romantic date night and changed the room lighting, and his girlfriend used the app to bring him back to reality with a single touch.
Our one Renter couple was only cast in two videos, so this was a really fun opportunity to allow them to have more screen time. The voiceover you can hear on TikTok was provided by our Editor Kevin Fermini’s girlfriend.
All four of our Renters talent had a blast working together despite having the TIGHTEST sets to work in. The color-blocked wall that is being painted is in a room that is barely 8 ft. wide—there was almost not enough space to get the camera and lighting into the room to film.
First-Time Homeowners want to feel successful in taking on their first home projects themselves.
The couple we cast as our First-Time Homeowners had incredible chemistry, and the two videos we shot that were daisy-chained together to make this video end with one of their best interactions. They also got to play with one of our two adorable dogs.
One of the most relatable things about getting everything organized and put away exactly where you want it to live post-move: you need to get something back out almost immediately.
This was one of the videos that combined footage from the 2021 shoot with our new appliance delivery storyline.
You’ll notice the Delivery person from the 2021 shoot is wearing a mask because it was a mid-COVID production.
Somehow we got a doggy door approved as a first-time homeowner DIY project in the main shoot… and we wondered how adorable it would be to tell the story from the dog’s POV.
Experienced Owners want to feel successful in taking on move-out or move-in projects.
This was one of our videos that was built around wipe transitions to move from one shot to the next. And the number of them we put it allowed us to easily cut this for any length and still tell a good story.
This was one of the videos that combined footage from the 2021 shoot with our new Home Services fence installation storyline.
All I can say is, Kris Boban is a wizard when it comes to VFX. And Roger Okamoto has the patience of a saint. Midway through post-production, the clients informed us that one of our videos showing a capability of one of The Home Depot’s proprietary apps would need to be changed because the app was being sunset in 2023. It was a key element of the storytelling and we couldn’t go back and re-shoot the scene, so we had to work with the hand motions our talent had used when we originally filmed the sequence and tell an entirely new story of her journey on The Home Depot app.
The original video showing the “Project Color” app scanning the young talent’s stuffed rabbit and making suggestions on paint for her room color based on that.
The final video showing the shopping experience for paint on The Home Depot app starting with a selection of trend colors from Behr® Paint.
Active Adults want to feel confident in letting The Home Depot’s trusted, local, licensed pros help them make updates to their new home.
This was one of the funniest videos we shot because our male Active Adult was making The. Best. Faces. as the fridge lit up to reveal the cake. Everyone in video village was in stitches by the time we called the shot good.