JONPAUL DOUGLASS ON CREATING DELICIOUS SPOTS FOR BUSH'S BAKED BEANS

 

The pandemic may have changed a lot of things this year, but it didn’t stop agencies from producing joyful summer campaigns. Jonpaul’s new work for Bush’s Baked Beans is a case in point. Below, he explains how he pulled off the “wild and crazy project” of creating TV spots for the venerable food brand during quarantine.

 

“The concept for the spot was lots of these little summer vignettes strung together with vintage 'roll that beautiful bean footage.’ Growing up with and quoting this commercial daily, I was overjoyed at the prospect of being a part of Bush’s beautiful bean history. 

 

We ended up finding that the safest route was to shoot remotely with a bare minimum crew size and use my garage as my main studio. Given that this was a summer spot, we had to make that summer-sun look—inside my house. After much thought, I figured out an approach that would give us everything we wanted while remaining safe and distanced. This meant more prep and shoot days, but fewer crew working remotely. 

My garage

I would have my props stylist, Billy Wesley, perform a no-contact delivery of prepped and painted props to my garage, and I would set them up with styled food from my food stylist, Casey Dobbins, and then shoot. Since we were going with the daily check-in method—rather than trying to Zoom art direct the shoot—I was able to deliver much more content than the agency would have ever expected. So I spent five days shooting our shot list (and more!) while the agency trusted me to get what we needed.

Setting up props

Then all my video and stills footage were sent to a very talented editor at Ethos, who took all of it and added footage from user-generated content as well as an additional LA production company, which was focused more on the lifestyle portions of the piece.

 

This was very much a collaboration between a bunch of really talented people who were never in the same room together. The agency art direction was spot on, and I was happy to have worked on this. I hope it brings a little joy to the people who see it.”