Production Deep Dive: The Good Patch

Updated: Mar 29

How We Met

We used to work with a little-known company named SmartyPants Vitamins. We shot with them regularly and handled much of their organic web and social. Our main creative contact within their company was Emily. When Unilever acquired SmartyPants, many of its creative team left to work with other emerging brands in the DTC space.

Enter, The Good Patch. A wearable wellness patch featured on many trendy influencer accounts and available at Target.

We started with them in early 2022 and helped build up their asset library with a series of two-day shoots covering everything from tabletop photography to vertical shorts for social ads.

Last month, we stepped up the engagement and shot an ad for CTV.

Scope of Work

This last shoot was a two-day engagement. The first day was dedicated entirely to the ad with the second day being a more typical photo + video product and lifestyle volume day.

We worked with comedian/influencer - Katherine Ellis - for the commercial spot and agency talent from Shamon Freitas for the second day.

Our in-house team handled scripting, shotlists, production schedules, casting, shooting, and editing. Jiyan came in big as our stylist - creating 3 unique scenes for the commercial.

We billed in the ballpark of $15k/day.

Production Process

We shoot a lot of comedy-driven skits internally. But we rarely get asked to do that for clients. Mostly because CPG and DTC brands in California benefit from a bright, clean, and aspirational aesthetic.

When we saw the early concept come through from The Good Patch, we were pumped.

They had outlined a rough concept of a Q&A done from the perspective of an influencer. They provided all the important technical talking points and we wrote in the rest.

We wanted to break the fourth wall and call in some Fleabag inspo to grab the audience's attention right off the bat (without being corny or gimmicky).

We did some back and forth with the client's legal team to make sure all the claims were TV-appropriate and then finalized the script to pass off to talent for some readings.

Then it was onto set design concepts. We had the idea of making it a press conference. We also like the thought of a cold open comedy stage. Stan called in some LA prop house connects and found us microphones to make the press conference happen.

We detoured somehow and ended up with the idea of a bubble bath - which was incredibly complicated from a logistics standpoint since we didn't have a functional tub.

After all that was locked, we moved on to lighting and wardrobe. The team all took turns with the production schedule, adding specific touches to tie the whole concept together.

We finalized the concept and schedule and got client approval. Then we remembered we still had to plan day 2 :)

The two days were packed. We were super smooth on day 1. Katherine was incredible and kept the set fun for the entire day. Until we put her in a mock bubble bath without any hot water :/

Day 2 was a little more autopilot with lots of products being hot-swapped into scenes with various talents. We shot a series of vertical - UGC style - videos as well as a bunch of product and lifestyle photography.

Deliverables

Day 1 was designed to deliver a 60s, 30s, and 15s ad for CTV and paid social. With all the different variations (aspect ratios, end cards for Target, and lengths), we exported 32 video files.

Day 2 produced around 60 still images and 10 short (10-15s) videos all in vertical formats.