Baker Smith has directed Emerald Nuts’ latest campaign, an attempt to warn society about the perils of the dreaded 3 o’clock slump.  The 3 x 30 second ads; ’Falling,’ Therapist’ and ‘Prison,’ were produced by James Horner at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners and Mala Vasan at Harvest Films, with MPC providing the post.

For the last few years Emerald Nuts has been trying to warn people about the danger of that afternoon drop in blood sugar that makes you a little groggy and careless.  This year they decided to bump it up a notch by showing what a real slump can lead to – explains Copywriter Erik Enberg. The result was three spots that show horrific consequences; a passenger and stewardess being sucked from a plane mid-flight, a therapist stuck in a burning office and a full scale prison break.

‘The team at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners chose Baker Smith to direct largely because of his foolish and insane claim that the way to do this was to do it for real – says Erik Enberg and Will Hammond.  So they threw people out of planes, they set a room on fire, they staged a prison break and it was wonderful fun.  Of course, this was all done under the watchful eye of MPC who would be charged with making the real stuff they were doing actually look real.’

Real, it turns out, is not so easy to do. Things like fire and wind don't always behave and many plates had to be used to create the final look.  MPC had to replace the heads of the stunt actors in ‘Falling’ and the 3D team had to create the falling drink cart after three unsuccessful attempts to shoot the cart on camera, which resulted in some fairly damaged objects.  Several groups of prisoners were composited together and monitor screens were replaced with the new footage.  For ‘Therapist’, several fire plates were composited onto the principal actor plate.  Compositing work for all three spots was carried out by MPC VFX Supervisor Franck Lambertz, who Baker seems to have enjoyed working with; 'MPC was great. I have built a small shrine to Franck and I pay homage to it daily.  I'm not buying his accent though. I have it on good authority that Franck is really from Ohio.”

Executive Producer James Horner said ‘I've been in the business for 20 years with a passion for getting it "IN CAMERA!" I trust FX supervisors about as far as I can throw them, but MPC has turned me around.  They were truly unbelievable.  Every time I deferred to their solutions the shots turned out better than I could have expected.  The work was unbelievable and stands for itself, but as a producer the thing I loved most was having a true partner.  Long story short, I probably could have stayed home and the spots would have turned out just as well.’

Mark Gethin added the final grade.