Hilton |
Nightmare Stays
Director | Writer
The brief: Make a Drunk History style re-enactment for the TikTok era.
Hilton wanted to turn people’s real “nightmare stays” into re-enactments. Their reference was Drunk History, a comedy central series I was obsessed with, so much so that I used their lip flap techniques on my series Ghost Story Club. But Drunk History was made for television and these ads were going to be on social.
I start all of my social projects with an audit of social to find precedence; high performing content that’s analogous to our project. I audited clips from Drunk History on IG and TT and found that they didn’t perform as well as they did on Youtube. My theory was that this was because the lip-flapping isn’t as successful on sound-off platforms.
So I turned to high-performance dream-core content on the platform, drawing inspiration from the work of brilliant creators like Savannah Moss, Grant Beans, and Jericho Mencke.
I’ve always been drawn to the low-cost, high-imagination “Sweeded” production design of artists like Michelle Gondry, whose techniques I adapted for Ghost Story Club and decided to repeat for Hilton.
Winning The Pitch
I felt good about my plan, but it was very different from what TBWA had briefed me in on, so to push it over the edge I shot and edited a proof of concept in my home, based on a true story from my own life about my own “nightmare stay”.
Tests, tests, and more tests
Hilton saw it, loved it, and we were awarded the work. But there were a lot of questions. Would we use real people or actors? Would we write scripts or improvise? We settled on using real stories as inspiration, scripting and casting actors, and using the same actors in the re-enactments.
As we scripted these spots, we were constantly testing techniques. Do these cut together? Are the jokes working? On jobs where every creative decision is so integrated, I like to keep the crew close, so instead of a hotel I opted to rent a house where we all lived together, solving creative challenges. My wonderful crew even volunteered to serve as talent in our tests.