I am Oregonian

This is a TV spot we just made to celebrate Oregon's 150th anniversary as a state. Below is the blog entry from one of the creative folks who helped develop the commercial.

Hi. I’m Dani. I work at Wieden+Kennedy, and quite a while ago, I designed the Oregon 150 logo. W+K has been helping the Oregon 150 organization with their sesquicentennial needs for a while now and when Travel Oregon partnered with OR150 and asked us to do a TV commercial for it, we were super pleased. To be honest, I thought it was an awesome opportunity to a.) tour around this gorgeous state of ours(!) and b.) not sit at my desk for a little while - also while touring around this gorgeous state of ours! I was joined on this filming journey by Melanie Fedunok, our producer, who seemingly effortlessly staged this whole thing, which, was no easy task. Here’s why:

Due to timing, we filmed it in March, which, as most Oregonians know, is not the least rainy month we have. Somehow, Melanie made sure we had NO RAIN on all 5 days of filming. Now, I’m not going to say it wasn’t c-c-c-cold filming with 3 out of 4 windows rolled down. I am also not going to say that maybe, just maybe Melanie did a non-rain dance every morning before the rest of us got up. If she didn’t, I don’t know how that happened.

We had to rig up a fake rear view mirror to film into. We couldn’t film into the actual rear view of the car we were driving because we couldn’t get the right angle of the yellow lines if we did that – at least not if we wanted to stay on the road. So we had to find someone who could rig up a mirror and camera on the outside of a car. Enter Reed Harkness, a very talented local filmmaker. He was amazing, solving not only the rear view rig, but he also drove the car while running the camera!

Getting those yellow lines. That was the toughest part I think. There were plenty of gorgeous places that just either didn’t have yellow lines in the road when we wanted to shoot, or well, no shoulder; we had to hug the very edge of the road to get the lines to well, line up. And Reed was a trooper through it all. I do wonder if he’s gotten used to driving like normal again yet; by the end of our trip, Reed would find himself drifting to the outside of our lane and going 30 miles an hour, no matter where we were. Which was fine in most places except maybe when it was time to go home via highway.