Recently, ASL traveled to South Florida to help Chewy bring their holiday Wish A Thon to life for both pets and their owners.
Our mission was to handle all aspects of production, including the set build, cameras and lighting, audio and live streaming to multiple social media platforms at once. We used vMix to build the program and ReStream to distribute to multiple platforms including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Youtube. With some of the streaming platforms being native to a 9×16 format, we decided to mount the cameras sideways and film natively to this vertical format.
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Our set build had three components and was brought together with a blue velvet curtain in a U Shape. For our main center stage area, the goal was a theatrical feel, so we found a vintage broadcast microphone and made that a central piece. Camera right we had our control station which was a custom built TV wall where we mounted 9, 27 inch TV’s together positioned vertically. We were able to display individual images or videos on each of the 9 screens, as well as bring one asset to life across all 9 screens. While at camera left was our wrapping station where Chewy employees were boxing wishes that came in as they happened.
Tying it all together was loads of holiday décor, gift wrapped presents and of course Chewy products. I’d also be remiss not to include our special guests, two golden retrievers Pancake and Donut who were on the floor and mainly kept to their dog pillows eating treats as our production took place.
We also used a disco ball and the Aputure lighting app to program a special lighting look whenever our host announced how many wishes we were at. This happened three times throughout the live stream. Our wonderful Director handled it all, jugling camera, audio, lighting and talent cues throughout the show to create an engaging program from start to finish.
The production had a lot of challenges but by far the biggest one was how to incorporate live information from the various platforms chats into the broadcast. To solve this we had multiple ways to communicate to our host Christina Kirkman, who was the driving force behind the whole show. One way we communicated with her was via an in-ear IFB where our director fed her information. However our director wasn’t able to do this and also cypher information from the social media networks chats so far that we set up a confidence monitor that mirrored a google sheet. So we had personnel live moderating the chat feeds and copying the best comments into the google sheet for our host to deliver.
This was difficult to rehearse as the agency wanted the broadcast to be as authentic as possible and really use actual comments. Thankfully our host was a total pro and able to play off of this truly live information. Additionally we were getting thousands of wishes in real time and had to display this information both graphically in our TV wall and verbally from our host. This took many rounds of rehearsal with our EIC manning an animated graphic that played in our TV wall and our director feeding the number of wishes into our hosts ear while our technical director made sure we were showing the right camera angle and also putting up correct on screen graphic overlays. Thankfully after a full day of rehearsal everyone was on their games and the three moments we updated the audience with the live wish count went off seamlessly.
There was one other challenge to this production. The client wanted to surprise our host with a gift for her pets and wanted it to be truly a surprise. We had to remove this segment from all of our rehearsals and make the moment happen in real time without our host noticing. This is always scary as you want to be as prepared as you can during a livestream but thankfully, this moment worked perfectly, surprising our host and garnering an authentic reaction while not causing chaos to our live production.
The final obstacle of our production was nailing a confetti toss after Chewy announced that they were going to double the donations and donate 5 million dollars to pets in need this holiday season. We had small confetti canons for this moment but with having the dogs on set they were worried about the loud popping sounds so we had to pivot just hours before we were going live. We ended up popping the canons away from the dogs, and cutting up paper to increase our confetti output. Then we made the decision to throw it from three places, over the camera that would be on our announcement, in front of our talent and from behind the talent from a ladder up above. Amazingly the confetti tosses spread perfectly and it was quite a celebratory moment of Chewy Blue confetti when our host announced that Chewy was doubling the donation!
All in all, despite many obstacles such as planning this production over the Thanksgiving break and having lots of moving parts that needed to be truly live, the broadcast was a total success and it felt great to be part of Chewy’s Wish A Thon, helping grant pet owner’s wishes and giving back to those in need this holiday season.
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