POST-PRODUCING A COMMERCIAL AIRED DURING THE OLYMPICS

The Olympics have some of the most amazing television commercials, and we were lucky enough to work on one. The Foundation for Chiropractic Progress (F4CP) hired another production company on the West Coast to produce the spot. Unfortunately, they weren’t able to finish the spot and tie up all the loose ends needed to produce a commercial. That's when we stepped in. 

The commercial featured an Olympic runner Erica Witter-Davis jogging through the streets of downtown LA, with her own motivational narration of her journey to become a chiropractor. NBC was going to air the commercial — among other networks — and they had some strict guidelines of how the commercial needed to be presented. For example, Witter-Davis wore sneakers with a quite visible Nike swoosh — the logo needed to be removed. Additionally, there couldn’t be any business or promotional signage or any other distracting signs in the film. Since Witter-Davis was jogging around downtown LA, there were multiple store and traffic signs that needed to be digitally removed from the footage. Being that almost every shot was moving and very dynamic, we needed to ‘track’ the shot and ‘mask out’ each sign, logo, or graphic that appeared in the commercial. It was a long, tedious process, but it was necessary to ‘clean up’ the commercial to be appropriate and nice looking for airing on national TV. 

Once all the signage and logos were removed, we needed to export the video for television. NBC has guidelines that need to be followed in order to air the video correctly; they provided a fifty page .pdf file that explained all the necessary technical specifications. After following the instructions meticulously, we finalized the video and added close captions for the hearing impared.

It was a great experience to work on a commercial that aired on national TV during one of the most watched sporting events in the world. Definitely made us proud!