 
Left to Right, Producer Josh Lind and Director Mike Goubeaux. Doritos Trophy.
For the continuation of our Thirteen and 1/2 Questions series, we recently caught up with an enthusiastic Mike Goubeaux coming down from the excitement of being a finalist in the Doritos Crash the Super Bowl Contest. His winning spot was featured in a previous Video Militia article. Mike's story is becoming increasingly common as high-end production becomes more and more attainable to the independent filmmaker, first brought on by a revolution in desktop post-production and in recent years with cameras finally becoming affordable. Like many featured here at Video Militia, Mike represents the future face of filmmaking, rooted in DIY skills that make him savvy with every aspect of the process from principle to post. See what this aspiring director had to say about being a champion among user generated content. Read more for the full interview.
Video Militia: The Doritos contest was a great break for you. How did you hear about it, and at what point did you decide you had a chance at this?
Mike Goubeaux: I have been known to seek out contests. I usually do so when I feel ready to do something where I have a lot of control or feel like I need the next level of exposure. It's hard to find contests of this caliber, and this one literally came up in a Google search. I have a found a few in the past that were nearly over etc, this one worked out perfect though. I had saved up money to do a spec spot and I thought before I blow this money on a traditional spec, maybe I can find a contest that has added value or opportunity attached.
The opportunity to have your spot aired during the Super Bowl is pretty enticing. They also offered decent prize money for Top 5 placement and great PR opportunities all throughout. I knew I could make a spot the moment I read the contest details, and after all the craziness with putting it together and even a last minute rewrite, I knew we had a great shot once I saw the final piece and looked at some of the other nearly 2,000 submissions.
VM: So Doritos flew you down to the Super Bowl. Any fun stories from that experience?
MG: Doritos treated the Top 5 teams like royalty and I believe they do so because they are really dedicated to making this "user generated" content work for them, and without us, it can't be done. Plus they just saved millions on production costs for spots, what's a couple hundred grand to treat the Top 5 winners right?
The entire experience was a blast, you travel and stay like a rock star, plus box seats to the Super Bowl, who can complain??? The best part really is the opportunity to have your spot air during the game! All of the pampering and fun times aside, I was dying to find out if we made number one. They really know how to keep the surprises coming, they announced a second official in-game spot and even a third pre-game spot that we all voted on.
The whole week was split between PR opportunities and playtime in Orlando and our amazing hotel. Meeting and getting to know the other Top 5 finalists was the greatest. We all bonded a ton and got a chance to jump on this crazy ride together and see where it would take us. It's hard to identify a single great moment, but the Doritos internal, Marketing, and PR teams made the trip something I will NEVER forget!
VM: Advertising gurus continue to cringe their teeth at these user generated spots, especially when guys like you are beating them at their own game and doing it for less money. The top Super Bowl spot, according to polls, was from the winning competitor in the Doritos Crash the Super Bowl contest. Creativity Magazine didn't even mention your name as director when they listed your spot in their Super Bowl recap. So what's your take on user generated content? Is it time for the little guy to get his recognition?
MG: I think this is a really interesting question! All the stars aligned in this case and I am not sure I am completely convinced that every spot we see can be the result of a contest or some other filtering system for user-generated content. Agencies and teams of other people have a big responsibility to babysit the brand image and what happens over the course of time with advertising.
The fact remains that an ad took the #1 spot on the USA Today Ad Meter that was made by two brothers from Indiana for less than $2,000. I think brands might start to think, "This is great, we can obviously get cheaper spots that do well, and in this economy, we'll look great!" That may be a stretch, but I do think the folks watching this unfold will have peaked interest in acquiring "user generated" content on the cheap now that there is some evidence it can perform really well.
The irony is that the Herbert brothers are now highly paid pros (they won a million bucks), so what happens to them next year when Doritos says, "Take down the ad pros"? Are the Herbert brothers in everyone's sights? If so, it means they went on to make pro careers out of this, if not, it means they are probably competing again for another $1,000,000.00. But will they, or will I sign up again for this or another contest if the reward is meek?
At the end of the day, Doritos saved some money on 5 decent looking spots, but they paid out a million dollar prize, paid for 5 teams to travel to the Super Bowl and countless open bar tabs. This was no free ride. The difference between Doritos and some other brand's efforts is that Doritos was serious about continuing to cultivate opportunities for their consumers to showcase their talents. I don't believe they do it to save a buck. Other companies are going to try to replicate this with crappy prizes, no opportunities for showcase and to top it off, they will treat the contestants like crud. Unless they really, really imitate the attention to detail, HUGE opportunities and amazing dedication to the consumers that Doritos practices, these other contests won't do things like de-throne Budweiser from the Ad Meter, they just won't get the quality of submissions!
VM: Tell us about Dandy Dwarves where do they fit in?
MG: The Dwarves were formed as a more informal group in film school at the Savannah College of Art and Design, where I met the current members. After everyone left school, it became a legit company and the executive producer, Josh Lind and jack of all trades (DP, VFX, Production Designer) Andrew Cook are based in San Francisco for now. Besides helping each other out here and there, we didn't really get a chance to work together in film school, but always talked about it. Finally, we found our chance.
I found the contest at the same time they did and I gave them a call. They had already decided to give it a whack with another director who is actually the first on their roster. Ultimately both spots were made. At any rate, I love working with these guys because they do really solid work with no money and no time. I guess you could say they still have the film school sleep schedule while trying to really break into the pro world quality-wise. I was confident they were the ones I needed to work with on this given the time and budget restrictions.
The Dwarves like to workshop things together with the core team and that makes brainstorming and development a nice process. I am used to working alone a lot, so it's a bit of an adjustment, but I guess the result speaks for itself. Technically speaking I wrote the spot, but it was clearly a collaboration on ideas. They always collaborate on everything. Everyone works differently and they respect my loner style and I am really trying to get into more and more collaborating. I am confident you'll see more Mike G and Dandy Dwarves collaborations in the future! Look em up at www.dandydwarves.com
VM: We know you shot this on the Red Camera. How did this compare with other formats you've shot in the past? Is it really the next revolution for Indies?
MG: The RED rocks, end of story. Seriously, though, it's a really, really solid camera. I've shot plenty of cine alte (sony F900) and varicam (panasonic dvcproHD) and as far as I am concerned, you can't even begin to compare them. The compression of dvcproHD is not great for visual effects work and the 4k resolution of the RED kills the F900 HD resolution. It works particularly great for me because I usually finish in 1080p, allowing that nice 4k resolution to be squeezed down.
The great thing is that RED is made by people who think like the folks at Apple. They are a relatively new company, but seem to be constantly rethinking how to make this device (or series of devices) really ideal for digital video creators. I have no problem calling it digital filmmaking, but I'd catch a lot of shit for that. I've shot about 3 rolls of film in my life, and I'll never do it again, so right there I loose credibility with old-schoolers who love film, but to me, it's not even a discussion of film vs. digital, it's a question of which digital camera is most awesome.
The RED is RELATIVELY affordable for what it does! It's recently revised "brain" design is even more flexible than the original and you can get the ok RED lenses for a decent price or you can rent high end glass to really step this guy up. I love the workflow too; I was home editing this Doritos spot in as much time as it took to drive from the set to the edit bay. Some people like to convert the REDCODE reference Quicktimes to ProRez or an offline codec, but I have had great luck just cutting the reference Quicktimes, which means no waiting! As soon as you lock picture, you can easily uprez this stuff to whatever finishing codec you want and you're ready to color and finish!
Visual effects are great with this camera because there is little to no noise, it's HIGH rez, so even if you finish in 1080, you can work your vfx at a higher resolution if needed. I have done some green screen stuff with it, and it blows away other digital cameras I've used. Now, I realize there are cameras like the Phantom out there, and from what I've seen, those are amazing, but they don't come close to the low cost of the RED for indies! To my knowledge there isn't a better digital camera out there for the $$ (I've seen complete RED packages out there for WELL under $1000/day). I've shot 3 pieces on it now and various tests, and unless I need to do super slo-mo or something, I'll probably request it for most of the work I'll be doing in the foreseeable future.
VM: What sort of budget were you working with and were there any sacrifices you had to make from your original idea because of budget?
MG: Originally, I determined I was willing to spend up to $4,000.00 on this project, but we secured some outside funding on a loan basis so I didn't have to shell out the cash. But for the sake of discussion, we spent less than $6,000 on the project. We spent the most money on a location mostly because we were out of time and really liked this place. As an indie creator, you have to be resourceful and find locations and cast on the cheap. In this case, we decided we were willing to blow cash to solve this problem, and that was only because we knew we didn't have any other super huge items to cover. It worked out really well because we ended up with an entire office floor with a kitchen and other prep rooms to use. Sometimes you get what you pay for.
You do have to sacrifice when working on tight budgets and I gave up things like prime lenses (or even nicer zooms), a larger crew, proper trucks etc. We have built a bit of good will with crew and artists based on our past contest success, so we were able to get everyone (including the camera op and his RED camera and lighting) on spec for points against the prize money. At the end of the day, everyone will be paid and our actors (who were actually paid a bit for their day) will get SAG royalty checks now that our spot is airing nationally! The rest of the money fizzles away fast when you have props, basic wardrobe, FOOD, and other expendables to pay for.
Josh and his team have gotten pretty good at coming up with cheap solutions to otherwise expensive problems and we tried to milk the rest of the money. One disadvantage of the Dwarves being in San Francisco is that I had to travel and stay up there for about a week, so that took a chunk of change as well. I am proud to say that the concept itself never suffered because of budget concerns. I think it's responsible to concept with a budget in mind, so we didn't think we were going to have helicopters and explosions or anything.
VM: Can you briefly describe the post-production aspects of the spot?
MG: The post process on 'Too Delicious' was pretty straightforward. We jumped right into editing and I made the first cuts while I was still in SF. Because the Dwarves had to move on to another previously scheduled project, it was decided that I would take everything back to LA and finish it up myself. I sent cuts up digitally for everyone to critique together and Andrew helped with one of the digital dust simulation passes for the last explosion shot, but otherwise I locked up the edit, uprez'ed and did the effects from my space in LA.
I used Crimson to take my locked EDL and make Cowboy Intermediates and then RED's free RedCine to transcode the REDCODE to uncompressed 10-bit 1080p24 material. I used After Effects to composite the last shot and some of the less noticeable effects (like correcting the number of chips in the tree in various shots). I also like to clean little things up that annoy the eye. For instance, the first shot had a fire alarm in the corner that I took out and I straightened the company name on the wall. This all happened in a few days with a Mac Pro, a couple G-drives (I religiously back up drives) and a Wacom tablet. It's great that this stuff doesn't really require any crazy gear or software anymore.
VM: For us one of the most genius parts of your spot is casting a red-haired guy to eat from the Doritos tree. Purely awesome! This must have been intentional. Was there anything that happened on set that you improvised, or just got lucky with, that otherwise you didn't plan for?
MG: The original script we casted to was a slightly different story, but with the same characters and from the get go I imagined his character as a redhead goof. He had to look gullible and a bit quirky. I like to pull a lot of reference imagery so I sent a few shots of redhead goofballs to Josh when we started casting and we posted casting notices on Craigslist with the description. We just got lucky with Samuel, not only was his look PERFECT, he is a really, really talented actor.
In fact, all of the cast was super talented and I felt like it was the first time (for a dialogue spot) that I was directing real actors. It turns out directing is WAY easier when your actors are awesome. I wish there was more time in a :30 to let these guys shine. There were so many great moments from all of them that we just couldn't keep. Samuel and his red hair nailed it though and exceeded my expectations.
I really just read through the script once with these guys and they were all over it. Samuel brought a great feeling to his short lines and gave a unique performance every take, which makes cutting really fun because you have tons of great options. I let Bob and Erin play as well, we tried various flavors when Bob's character says "Maybe it's sizzlin' picante" and he just made that one sing with his expression. They played off of each other so well, that we really just ran the lines until we got the timing and groove down and then covered it from the angles I thought worked best. Each take would yield something a bit new or better, so we ran several takes in each setup until we thought we had a couple great options in the can.
VM: What do you intend on doing with the prize money?
MG: Most of the prize money is spoken for by way of paying back the initial loan, and paying out on the points we awarded for everyone working spec. The Dwarves and myself are taking a little chunk, but we're really happy to be able to pay everyone and still end up with a spot we are really happy with that cost us a cool $0.
VM: Did the check come as one of those giant Publishers Clearing House checks?
MG: In fact it did. One of the events during our trip was this amazing dinner Doritos put together to honor not only the Top 5 winners, but the many people on the Doritos internal team, the marketing team, the PR team and the agency folks who were there with us. It might sound like a lot of back patting, but we (the Top 5 winners) were ready to recognize all of the people who had worked so hard to make this contest a truly amazing experience! They only let us focus on them for a moment before they started showering us with more cool goodies, like awesome over-sized checks for $25,000!
The coolest thing they gave us that night, though, was this AMAZING trophy that looked like the rock pile and TV theme from the contest site. It's a 3d statue of the rock formation with a little TV set on top that actually plays our spot plus they had loaded it with photos from the trip. It's my favorite keepsake from the whole experience!
VM: Has the success of this spot started to come home? Has it affected your career yet in ways that you'd hoped?
MG: It may be early to tell just yet. It took me nearly a week to recover from all of the fun and I only just got back on my game and into my email box to try to sort out what's next. I haven't checked to confirm, but I don't believe production companies are lining up outside my apartment. I do feel, however, that having a national spot running for Doritos is going to make for a nice calling card when I start sending reels out to production companies.
One of lessons I am quickly learning is that you've got to have enough of the same type of work to really convince someone (or some production company) you are ready to play ball. It's obviously important to consider the type of material on your reel, and I need to start grooming my projects to be sure I am collecting up the right type of work to interest the right people. Again, it's early, and I am already pitching on some cool stuff, only time will tell if this has really been the career-starter I hoped for.
VM: This is sort of a staple question in this series, and in no way a space filler. We think it gets at the heart of what we are trying to do here at Video Militia. What advice do you have to other filmmakers who are just starting out and maybe thinking about that breakout spot?
MG: I'd say, from what I've been learning, it's important to make spots as often as possible! The advice I've been given is to try to get real good at a genre, like physical comedy or visual effects spots etc. That's easier said than done when you're just starting out and, if you're like me, don't know WHAT you want to focus on yet. But even if you don't know where you want to focus, making spec spots seems to be one of the fastest ways in the door. This means money and time to create them.
For me, I decided to pursue my post skills including motion graphics work to fill my time and my piggy bank. Some of those gigs have even lead to directing, so I think it's important to have some marketable skills while you pursue directing. I'd clearly be in a cardboard box trying to pitch concepts if it weren't for the post work I do day-to-day. It's early enough in my career that I should probably be asking for advice, not giving it, but the limited experience I do have has shown me that tenacity is a gold mine.
The guys out here doing this professionally have been at it a while, and if not, they had a lucky break or are just pure genius. I think I've had a heck of a first year in L.A., but I realize that it's going to take some commitment and stick-with-it to finally make a break. If you aren't ready to be more hungry than the next guy, it might be worth looking at other careers. On the positive side, there's work out here, the ad world is probably going to change a whole bunch here in the very near future, but telling stories won't go away.
Without having years of experience to speak from, I think my advice is only so valuable, but I am fairly certain that finding any way you can to practice is probably the key. A guy named Dr. Daniel Levitin has done research that he feels proves it takes 10,000 hours of practicing something to achieve mastery. Think about how many spots it would take to spend that kind of time practicing directing! At a rate of a couple opportunities a year, it could take a while, so better get started. Man, I should really stop writing this and go direct something. I am only a hand full of hours deep.
VM: What's next for you?
MG: I am pitching on projects with Dandy Dwarves who have started to carve a tunnel in the agency world. Hopefully one of these pitches will stick and we'll do our first big agency gig together, which will be sweet.
Until then, I continue to freelance as a designer, animator, compositor and pitchman for motion graphics and title sequences. Many of those jobs bring live action directing opportunities and I try to steer towards the projects like those. I actually enjoy doing main titles for television when they have live action, so I have no problem spending my days working on that stuff as I develop my spot reel.
Ideally, I'd sign with a production company and start directing commercials tomorrow. Until then, I am having fun pushing forward and creating. Every day brings story-telling of some sort, and I feel blessed to say my job is to tell stories.
VM: Nacho Cheese, Cool Ranch or Spicy Nacho?
MG: Haha... I can't choose Sizzlin' Picante?
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