THE PROBLEM

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona (BCBSAZ) offers health insurance and related services to more than 1.5 million customers. They approached Explore with a particular issue: for a statewide commercial campaign, they had already filmed on-camera talent (colleagues and employees) and put together edits. The problem? The spots didn’t resonate, or leave viewers feeling connected with the messaging.

THE SOLUTION

Explore offers more than just production, we have extensive experience over the past 20 years handling complex editing and finishing projects. If there’s one thing we’ve learned, equipment and technological advances are important, but as Blue Cross Blue Shield was experiencing, without a sense of how to weave a script so that it reveals itself naturally and compellingly, and without the taste needed to craft an exciting short-form story, a commercial campaign can fall flat. Take a look at the original commercial below:

After watching that commercial, we dove in and started deconstructing the spot. We first took a look at the script and all of the footage and found a key flaw: the real people actors were edited completely wrong. Only a few people were delivering lines that were far too long for a non-actor. What this means is the editor may leave a great part of the delivery out of the piece because the talent stumbled on the last part, or didn’t look at the camera, or a door closed in the background, any number of issues can happen when trying to find the perfect take. The root problem is that real people will never give perfect acting performances. Asking a non-actor to deliver a longer line is like asking an accountant to build a car. They may find an engine and frame, maybe they even build a shell of a car with spare parts they find, but they simply lack the expertise, product and tools to deliver a flawless, shiny, technological and mechanical marvel. The same metaphor can also be used for in-house production teams vs. professional commercial production companies who have the expertise, products and tools only gained from years of experience working with a variety of brands, agencies, and storytelling styles.

So we added more talent delivering the parts of a shorter line where they really looked and sounded great. Problem solved? Not quite - the next step we took was to vary the “look” of the spot. All of the talent were framed exactly the same size, on the same side of the screen. But the footage was shot scaled back in 4K, so by resizing each on-camera real person, we were able to create variety and believability. We took out the dissolves which are a crutch for so many amateur productions. Then we simplified the background from bright, jarring colors and graphics to a subtle, dimensional white screen with a hint of background elements fuzzy behind the talent, which also gave each shot a sense of depth.

The final touch we added in the post production of this Blue Cross Blue Shield commercial campaign was to take out the original stock music track, and replace it with tasteful music that not only moved the piece, but adding an inspiring sense of story as well. See just one spot in the new Blue Cross Blue Shield “We Love Arizona” commercial campaign below:

THE DELIVERABLES

One amazing side result of BCBSAZ partnering with Explore on the post-production of their commercial campaign was that our solution to use many more on-camera talent in the spots resulted in a number of additional deliverable for Blue Cross Blue Shield. This first project resulted in one :60 spot that featured all of the lines, but then we cut those lines up into three additional :30 spots by using the same intro and outro lines…but because we edited different talent performing those intro and outro segments in each spot, they looked and felt like new commercials. The client was ecstatic at the additional value added to their production budget!