Walmart - Holiday TikToks

It takes a lot of effort to make something look effortless. When people make content they are in the moment, present and spontaneous. But commercials can’t afford to be spontaneous. Especially at scale. For this project we needed to make 23 unique Holiday spots. That’s 23 scripts. 23 Christmas trees. 60 principal actors. 3500 square feet of storage just for wardrobe. 1000 square feet of fake snow. And every single item that appears on camera must be purchasable from Walmart, meaning that every piece of furniture must be removed from the locations and replaced. That’s dozens of trucks. In no time at all, we have a Hollywood scale production.

My task is to keep the feeling small.

It starts with research. I pulled over 300 Holiday TikToks, of varying types and level of performance to inform our composition, format, lighting, casting, and blocking.

Then, I insisted on shooting on iphones, using the same camera that every day people make their content with. When possible, I put the camera in the hands of the actors themselves, removing as much production on set as possible so that actors felt like they were making content on their own.

With a great plan, and lots of preparation, the execution can be flawless. On this project I had the most capable partners in both the three agency’s and my crew, and as a result, we were able to produce 15 second spots at a rate of one per hour of production.