Your video should
make an impact
ASK: Bottle Rocket Media was selected by American Girl to produce a series of videos for a variety of new products for the holiday season. All of the videos were going to live on YouTube and needed to appeal to their audience and fanbase there. The videos would feature American Girl Dolls, accessories, and clothing too.
CHALLENGE: American Girl had experimented with a variety of video formats and styles on YouTube. We needed to pick the right solution that would both appeal to the customer base, and fit within their budget goals. Across the 4 videos, we knew we would need to create 5 unique 18” doll-scaled sets, almost from scratch.
SOLUTION: The style we landed on is called “doll-play” in the biz. It includes building a fancy set (scaled to the 18” dolls) that the dolls live in with regular human hands moving them around (ie. playing with them). Our Creative Director, Dan Wulfing, led this production. We knew the dolls and products we needed to feature, but each video’s story was up to us to write, design, and shoot.
Storyboards were created to layout each shot of the videos. Dan sketched out each set from a variety of angles, including a top-down layout plan where the room elements would be, and where the camera would be for each shot.
Our production design team then got to work, taking those sketches and bringing them to life. The first stop was a trip to Wisconsin and American Girl HQ where we did a little set-shopping in their studio to find as many items as we could to fill our sets. Plus, custom graphics and new props were found or built to complete the sets. We even built a beautiful sit-in window box for the Christmas set.
Using the storyboard as our guide, each frame was captured and assembled in the edit. We added fun motion graphics and sounds to bring it all to life.
RESULTS: They loved all of the spots and they were part of a successful ad campaign.
