Bringing the Boom: Behind the Scenes of Our UE Boom Ad

Sometimes Prolex Media produces spec ads (speculative advertisements) as a way to flex our creative muscles, try out new production ideas or techniques, and showcase work in our portfolio that we haven’t yet had the opportunity to do for a real partner.

For example, we previously produced a SkillShare spec ad as a way to try our take at a commercial using the one-shot cinematic style. The resulting video is a powerful portfolio piece, and the experience allowed us to get comfortable with the one-shot style process.

Having a few musicians on the Prolex team, for our next spec ad we were inspired to work on an idea centred on music as the universal language. We may all have different tastes in music ,but the one thing that binds us together is that we hate driving in awkward silence.

During a beat-bumping brainstorm, we decided the perfect product to feature would be the one and only UE (Ultimate Ears) Boom 3 Bluetooth speaker. This awesome bluetooth speaker has amazing sound quality, is water- and dust-proof, and has a rugged build designed to withstand any environment.

But one of our favourite features of the UE Boom 3 is the PartyUp feature, which allows you to wirelessly daisy chain these speakers in social settings to really get the tunes pumping. We built our video concept around this key unique feature: A friendly face off between two talented dancers with connected Booms.

Our friend Genie quickly connected us to two amazing local dancers, Benjamin and Stedroy, who would be perfect for our vision. After cycling through several location options, we came back to our first choice: a friend’s private vehicle storage facility we had used on multiple occasions in the past.

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With our location locked in and music selected, we were able to finally get our shoot day scheduled with the dancers. All there was left to do was...create the entire video.

We rented some lights through Midcan (one of our favourite places for quality on-set gear from quality people) and got to work building our set. We worked it out to allow nearly 360 degrees of movement available for the camera, while also providing dramatic light to illuminate our dancers properly from all these angles.

To do so, we got our lights up high on C-stands and when we needed close ups we would reconfigure our set up to use diffusers on our key light.

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Once everything was set up, shooting was all about finding “the nuggets” (a very technical term for those powerful primo shots that are heavy with stylistic impact). We set up our DJI Ronin-S2 and the RavenEye with two camera operators (Jordan and Austin) to ensure everything was being captured in frame and up to par.

The dance routine was standard for our professional dancers, but it sure was a great workout for Jordan. He had to learn his own set of choreo to make sure he was in the right place at the right time, without literally stepping on any toes or accidentally breaking something during the breakdancing.

Aside from the usual logistical challenges leading up to the shoot day, the shoot itself went incredibly smooth. Our amazing dancer talent was there to help us out and get creative with how we captured their flow, and we were able to create something really fun and expressive to fulfill the vision perfectly: Music is the universal language. And no other language was present until the tagline and product at the end.

After the editing process, this video has been waiting in our completed folder for far too long, and we are very excited to finally have this out for you all to see. Check out the full video below, and if you dig it we would really appreciate it if you gave it a quick thumb’s up on YouTube.

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