When you’re a businessman, one of the things you learn is to never accept a first offer. That’s why, when the blogger of Leveraged Sell Out (www.leveragedsellout.com) asked me to help him make a viral video to promote his new book in exchange for $25 and a box of trinkets, I laughed in his face.

“Come on now, don’t low-ball a baller, especially not when he’s high,” I said in a weird way. “I’ll do it…but not unless you give me $25 in fives and ones, a shirt you don’t wear anymore…and all of those f$%*ing trinkets.” Needless to say, he folded like a Hollister employee.

This video was one of the most enjoyable I’ve ever produced and I really credit it for pulling me out of a creative rut. I was living in NYC, working for ma boy R. Murda at News Corp and not producing much of anything on the side, as I had promised myself I would. Then one day, a friend-of-a-friend who was writing a finance blog called Levereged Sellout got in touch with me about making a viral video to promote his new book, for which he got a modest marketing budget from Hyperion.

His first idea was to have me ghostride a black car on camera, which would a little bit like having a twenty-year old Johnathan Lipnicki record himself saying “No no no, let’s go to the zoo.” OK, who am I kidding, I have no pride, but I still thought I could come up with something better.

So I pulled together the brain trust and got to work. The premise we settled on was a rap battle between bankers and consultants and the resultant verse was a real rapper-by-committee, with lines shipped in from all corners of the country. After a late-night recording session in the midtown loft of the Apes and Androids masterminds, we were ready to make a movie.

The shooting took place down the day after my brother’s 21st birthday so we were both a little beat up from the feet up, but we managed to assemble a small posse to play out this farce down near Wall Street. The shoot, which was directed by the venerable Benjamin Ahr Harrison, took about three hours of backpack rolling, white board erasing, and 2X2 matrix outlining. During the taping, we drew a pretty sizable crowd of tourists, who wore on their faces the same WTF look that I remembered from shooting in Asia, the kind of look that reminds you that you’re not doing what you’re supposed to be doing, which is good.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 12th, 2009 at 11:42 am and is filed under Client Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.