Movers 2022
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 content to fill those holes!
The Insights
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.
The Idea
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.
The Details
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 would be shadow-shooting and doing the post-production for those in tandem with The Home Depot's Creative Services team.
And don't forget the 8 TikToks...
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! Those 8 videos are on their own project page.
The Execution
Video
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 our tasks showing any Smart Home products was displaying the Hubspace app's capabilities. Our featured male talent wanted a romantic date night, and his girlfriend use the app to bring him back to reality.
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.
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.
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.
One of the most relatable things about getting everything organized and put away exactly where you want it to live: you need to get something back out almost immediately.
And then there was that d@%# bunny...
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.
My Role
Where to even start with this one...
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.
In 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 isn't on the 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 content we shot has been layered in with the original Movers content shot in 2021 and has been used throughout all of 2023.
Disclaimer: This was a COVID-compliant set and production. We removed our masks indoors just long enough to snap a group photo.
25
17
8
4
4
3
12
2
Total Videos made up of
Vignettes / Mini Stories and
TikTok / Reels / Snap ads for
audiences over
days of shooting at
locations featuring
talented actors and
adorable dogs
The Team
Scott Hunt, Creative Director - Video
Jonathon Haigler, Creative Director - Stills
Jasmine Brandon, Art Director
Ben Goren, Copywriter
Jordan McMonagle, Director of Photography
Judith Hoffman, Executive Producer
Pooja Pasari, Senior Producer
Roger Okamoto, Post-Producer
Vivian Zingleman, Editor
Kris Boban, Lead Motion Designer/VFX
Wanna find me elsewhere?
You'll get bored quickly... it's a lot of photos of my adorable husband, our kids and our rescue dog, Porter.
