To quote Ralphie from a Christmas Story, a crummy commercial? But we tried to do a little something more.

Watch it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2mU6jVcv4w

More background on the project from the FWRHS:
http://fortwaynerailroad.org/travel-refreshed/

Kelly,

Nicely done and a LOT more effective than the Coca-Cola commercials I've recently seen in the movie theatre.

Sure hope it leads to a well deserved contract for you from Coke.


Ross Rowland

Creative indeed! Excellent commercial without having a 1-800 number shouted at you repeatedly or "But wait, there's more".
Good job Kelly.
As good as the "Gee thanks Mean Joe" from years ago.
Probably didn't hurt the Society's kitty either.

Very moving. Who had the bottle opener?

Man, I wondered the same thing...



While we intend to use this as an overture for some creative corporate sponsorship, a few a us pooled the resources to create the budget, as this was done purely as a speculative project.

The biggest single expense was lighting (not counting the 400-ton monster that was laying over at the location anyway); the smallest expenses were food and gas for talent and crew making this a typical independent short film budget, where food is often the best/only pay.

Kelly

"Nicely, Nicely!"

Hi All
All I can say is Excellent , Pat

"We plunged into the cornucopia quivering with desire and the ecstasy of unbridled avarice."

- Ralphie in A Christmas Story

My 2yr old twins love watching your video . They love watching American steam on you tube but have little interest in little blue engines . Their favorite engines to watch happen to be #765 & #90.

You mean to tell me that wasn't professionally done with a Coke-sized budget?

WOW! I got chills, just like I always do when I hear the whistle.

So, explain this to me.... this was done with their OK as a 'well, go ahead if you want to and we'll pay for it if we like it' deal?

Great job!
I hope to heck Coke likes it, as if they don't, they'll hit you with a cease and desist letter faster than you can say, "Foamer"!

CXease and desist? Why turn off free advertising?

dave

Very nice... but didn't the conductor's mother every tell him to CLOSE THE REFRIGERATOR DOOR?

If Coke is smart, they probably won't. But the issue is that Coke is a registered trademark and this ad was done without their permission at all.
If you owned a business and someone, for whatever reason, decided to make an ad for you, you might just think, "Hey! That's my brand! Who do these people think they are, making an ad for me, and using my own brand name?"
Just because it's a good ad, it doesn't at all mean that it's in line with Coke's own vision for their own ads.
You can't just make an ad for a company without their permission for public viewing, because the company has now had their brand name associated with a message they had no hand in. I can't understand why anyone here could possibly think that's a good thing.
It makes no difference that the ad in question is good. It is good and I like it a lot. But it's still without Coke's permission or approval.
They probably did like it, and they probably won't take issue with it. But they can if they want, as it's their brand and we don't have the right to just create stuff that appears to be representing a company we have no connections to. I used to do art and design for a career and I worked on several print and television ads, back in the day. When you're doing something for a brand, it's amazing how a company will scrutinize [url]everything[/url] to be sure you're giving them the representation they think is right.

It's popular in the film industry to do things on "spec" or of a speculative nature, sometimes to promote an idea or concept, or utilize a new camera platform. They can be like case studies. Do a search for "coke spec ad" on Vimeo or YouTube and you'll see everything from earnest efforts by film students to well funded production houses using it to demonstrate their capabilities. The risk of infringement is there, to be sure.

In this case, if I may put all of our cards on the table, we made it primarily to do two things: introduce the 765 to audiences that may not necessarily just sit and look for "NKP 765 videos" on YouTube, but also to demonstrate that the 765 is capable of far more than her creators may have intended in 1944. And there isn’t enough of this type of marketing in railroad preservation. One thing that drives everything we do in Fort Wayne in terms of marketing and is to try make rail preservation and the locomotive culturally relevant…so we made a movie.

From an advertising perspective, the 765 is a unique commodity generating millions of impressions each year. Sold out trips, crowded railroad crossings, a popular GPS app, a prominent downtown railyard park development, 1.3 million page views on the website, 120,000 views on a single day from folks following the engine in a single day.

For a corporate sponsor, this would provide a very unique marketing opportunity. It just so happens that the Travel Refreshed image was on a postcard we used for a billboard on my family’s HO-scale model railroad. And it went from there.

I know folks at Coca-Cola have seen it already and we’re going to submit a sponsorship request through their normal channels (year long marketing campaign? underwriting a beefed up GPS tracking app? rebuild and wrap a passenger car?) but even if nothing comes of that angle, we have a sweet little piece that tells just enough about what we do with the 765, and the Coke bottles just become the bonus.

As a filmmaker, it would be pretty out-of-this-world to become an actual national commercial that appears in broadcast or in special channels like movie theaters, or inspires a project very similar (and hopefully better funded), but the goal is to get more eyes on the choo-choo and tell a little story.

And a side note -- when I showed my dad a rough cut about a year (!) ago, he started crying. While the affinity for Coke and the 765 and everything else you see were a major part of my childhood in some way, I'd not considered how everything we filmed was also a part of his childhood, and it occurred to me how many times he had probably watched his father disembark from one of the New York Central or Indiana Harbor Belt steam locomotives he worked on and maintained. The steam locomotive is a great perpetual memory machine.

Kelly