From the Archives: Credit Karma
This is an old post from way back in the (never saw the light of) day! I thought it would be worth dusting it off and sharing it this week.
CREDIT KARMA
Coming from a background of narrative storytelling, when we get the opportunity to work on narrative projects — be it music videos, short films, or creative spots — we get more excited than little kids in a sandbox.
At the end of 2013 we created a series of regional broadcast spots for Credit Karma. It was a really fun project for us, and it gave us the opportunity once again to create narrative work.
From pitch to post, this production was created from scratch. The challenge was to create a set of commercials that dealt with the real world problems of needing to get a credit score while also emphasizing the pain of searching for a site that didn’t require your credit card information. Those kind of parameters don’t necessarily lead to laugh-out-loud funny so we had to get creative with how we played the comedy.
To collaborate on concepts and scripts, we reached out to Sean Conroy and Raymond Hobbs, who we worked with on our First Money Lending video, and it was a blast to collaborate with them again:
For this series, the process was much more involved. Since these spots were for broadcast, we had to work within the strict constraints of a 30 second format. Writing for a specific total running time presents a lot of challenges, and it permeates the entire production process. From the start, these scripts had to essentially be a page in length (or less), really cutting to the heart of the message. So, again, very little time for jokes, punchlines or people slipping on banana peels or getting slapped in the face with a fish. There was a lot of back and forth with our client to make sure that we were hitting the message at the right points in the video, showing the pain, mentioning Credit Karma at the right time, and showing the relief before the spot ended.
Once the scripts were in a good place, we created storyboards to be built into an animatic to further make sure everything was fitting in place. This was an extremely helpful process for all of us to understand pacing. Listen to the soothing sounds of Chris Walters on this one:
This was a great tool for communicating with Credit Karma how the production would look and feel. It also helped us understand pacing with the actual production. During production, we rehearsed the scene several times, timing it so we could understand where needed to tighten up or trim. Once we knew the scenes were hitting the right times, we started really playing around to get comfortable with performance and trying out options and ideas to help keep the tone of the videos fresh and fun.
As we mentioned before, since we really weren’t going for any crazy jokes, the comedy had to be in the performance. Casting was very important to find actors with good delivery and a very genuine attitude. We framed shots with the intention of keeping very static so that we could focus the viewer’s attention on the characters and the simple stories that were playing out.
For post, the goal was really to simplify the story as much as possible. All unnecessary reaction shots, details, and cutaways were taken out to make sure we could let the story flow. Again, because we were dealing with an exact time limit, efficiency in our storytelling was critical.
The end result is a set of fun and upbeat spots that have a very nice quality to them, imho.
Enjoy!
Post-script — since this post was originally written, we’ve engaged with Credit Karma once more, making a fun series of videos that involved pro-wrestlers in desperate need of a credit score. So yes, in case you were wondering, even wrestlers are concerned about good credit. You should be too.
