- Today, we're remaking Brad Pitt's coffee commercial.
And if I'm completely honest,
things have gotten a little out of hand.
(intense dreamy music)
- Let me explain how all this came to pass.
Now you may be familiar with Fiverr.
It's an enormous marketplace
for kind of digital services.
And they actually approached me and said "Hey,
do you know that we do a load for businesses
and say you could crew a film shoot
with people from Fiverr,
with professionals from Fiverr".
And I didn't know that.
And they said "if we give you a budget,
what would you make,
if you had to make something beautiful?"
And I thought about it for a minute.
And I thought,
well, what about if we remade the
Brad Pitt coffee commercial?
And in that moment,
that seemed like a fun thing to do.
And I did not understand what an incredibly complex
and enormous task I had signed up for.
But, Fiverr said yes.
Here's some budget,
go and hire some people,
go and make a thing.
And that, is what we did.
Now I did say, right at the start of this thing,
that this shoot got a little bit out of hand.
And if I'm honest,
it did so in a number of different ways.
Some more hilarious than others.
Let me, or past me, explain in a bit more detail.
Now we don't have a Pacific Coast highway in England.
We,
we have Beachy Head, which is where we are today.
And when I say like we've got Beachy Head,
we've got Beachy Head.
Like we're gonna close the road to film on there.
I didn't know that was allowed.
I didn't think someone who makes like
coffee YouTube videos was allowed to close roads.
But apparently if you do the paperwork
and you pay the sort of fees, yeah,
you can close a road.
And so we're gonna film with a tracking vehicle.
Which is this big, old vehicle behind me over there.
We're gonna film crew on there, you know,
the bike, beautiful coastline.
And that, I feel like, is an adequate substitute
for the Pacific Coast highway.
This feels like a lot.
I don't know.
I didn't think at any point in my career,
this would be how my day would go.
I will say that now,
if you haven't seen the original Brad Pitt De'Longhi
coffee commercial, now is a good time to watch it.
There's a link down in the description.
Or, if you wish for a layer of more entertainment,
I made a video about it,
kind of going through a kind of reaction to it,
because it was such an incredibly entertaining video.
And that's linked down in the description below.
Watching that one will help
when you watch my version of it,
cause a few more things will make sense.
Let's go back to what exactly I had committed to do.
That Brad Pitt coffee commercial
is directed by Damien Chazelle.
He's a Oscar-winning Hollywood director.
It's a Hollywood commercial, right?
And I was like, I'm gonna do that.
I'm gonna do it in just two days.
And that's ambitious.
And in fact, everyone I spoke to was like,
'this you would maybe wanna do as like a four day shoot'.
And I was like, 'no,
we're gonna do it as a two day shoot'.
And that, it turned out, was doomed to failure.
Obviously, we couldn't have the size of crew
that the original sort of production had.
And if you actually go and watch the
behind the scenes of that,
you can sort of see little snippets of kind of
how much production went into that coffee commercial.
And as well,
you can see just how many Brad bags there were!
There was like a staggering number of Brad bags.
Back to how we crewed this thing.
Now, if you wanna make a commercial,
even at the smallest scale that we're kind of working at,
then there are some really key roles
that you needed to fill.
And that's where Fiverr came in.
So, I went to Fiverr to start looking for
the kind of key roles for this.
And usually, I direct a lot of the videos on this channel,
I suppose.
Seems a bit grand to call myself a director.
But I would sort of fill that role here.
With this project, I knew that I needed two key roles.
One of which was director.
And the other was DOP, director of photography.
These two were gonna be absolutely crucial.
And I feel like I really lucked out
by finding Lightmill Media on Fiverr.
Who are a director and DOP duo.
And they were the first people I spoke to
and started to work with
and kind of built a relationship with.
They were amazing to work with, I'll say that,
throughout this.
They were really great to work with, Ross and Chris,
amazing, amazing people.
So much fun.
But we needed more crew.
And so the next person you're gonna need
is gonna be an AC, an assistant camera,
or a first AC.
And they're gonna do things like pull focus.
Because you know,
Ross might be holding the camera,
Chris might be directing,
someone else actually focuses the camera
during the shot,
to make sure everything looks really good.
And helps out with kind of maintaining all the camera,
doing all the kind of technical stuff alongside.
We had a couple of different people,
Nicola and Paige, both phenomenal people
to find through Fiverr.
And then we needed a gaffer.
It's someone who's primarily concerned
with lighting,
controlling light.
And so yeah, Ed did tremendous work.
You can have all the fancy equipment
and all the fancy lenses,
but light is this massive deal to make things look good.
And you can judge for yourself,
just how good his work is.
Again, with really really restricted time
and kind of resource.
Lastly, and kind of the key crew, is gonna be sound.
Now, we added some more dialogue
to this particular version of this thing.
And in fact,
well it was more than just me doing some talking.
Somewhere here is a little cameo from a previous video
you might remember.
For all of the sound stuff,
which wasn't just dialogue recording,
but also a lot of the sounds that we captured
during the shoot, we had Cam.
Cam was amazing, again, to work with.
Did a great job.
We've got so much great sound from this thing.
And sound is really, really, really
super important when you're making videos.
Especially if you want 'em to look and feel
kind of special.
This was the core crew that set out
to do this ridiculous thing.
We might have pulled it off.
We might actually have pulled this off.
Were it not for the outdoor film shoot's
great natural nemesis,
the British weather.
Now, the way it worked is,
actually we shot out of sequence.
And the first day of shooting,
we shot inside, all the kind of internal shots.
And so that was the kind of
apartment that I kind of lived in
or all the kind of the nice house or the,
I don't know what we call it.
It was a really beautiful space
and kind of fun to work in that.
So welcome to a very hazy house,
that will be my house for the day.
Shooting some kitchen stuff over there,
and we just might set a fire alarm off,
but that's fine.
But it's very hazy, it's very pretty.
We also shot in Prufrock,
which was our kind of cafe location that we needed to use.
But the second day was kind of all the external stuff,
all the kind of motorbike stuff,
all of the kind of outdoors shots.
And in, you know, it had been a summer,
it had been the longest, hottest, driest summer
I could remember.
And we managed to find the one day
of constant and unrelenting rain.
So what you can see in the background,
is a van being packed up
because we can't shoot today.
There's too much rain.
It's not safe to ride the bike.
It's not safe to do a tracking shot. At - at
25 past 10 in the morning of a full day,
we are done.
And this is where things started to get tricky.
We needed to complete the shoot
and it meant we needed to film for a third day,
which means we had to hire everyone for a third day.
We had to hire equipment for a third day.
We had to get permitting for the third day.
And in true Hollywood fashion,
this meant we were way behind schedule
and way over budget.
It meant that the third day of shooting
really, really, really, really had to go well.
So this is the first location for the day.
And we came here last time and it wasn't good.
It was not good.
Today,
the weather has smiled upon us.
It's beautiful day.
We're in the middle of kind of nowhere,
honestly.
And that's kind of nice, filming
the kind of rural retreat at which I live,
which is not a kind of California thing.
But, you'll see,
it'll make sense.
A bit late already this morning,
a bit stressed.
It's a lot to do today.
I dunno how much we're gonna get done,
but we'll find out.
We have to get everything done.
Oh, we gotta go.
We've gotta go, okay.
- [Crew] Get you on the bike? - I'm on the bike, okay.
Now, if you've watched the original,
you probably have some questions.
Primarily around the motorbike.
That commercial, it's a coffee commercial,
is very motorbike centric.
I should probably do some explaining on that front.
I'm not gonna surprise you by saying,
I know nothing about motorbikes.
I don't own a motorbike.
I know nothing.
And so there was really
just one choice.
I had to call Brad.
And so I called Brad.
And Brad has been amazing.
So generous with his time, his knowledge.
Not only did Brad agree
to lend a bike for this production,
Brad agreed to come down and let his,
you know, give us his hands-on expertise
for the shoot.
He's here, Brad.
- Hello everybody.
(both chuckling)
- This is Brad.
He has a company called Dark Arts Coffee in London.
Check 'em out, they're down below,
and an amazing bike.
Tell me about the bike.
- The bike.
It's a Harley Davidson.
It's a chopper.
- [James] Nice.
- [Brad] It was built by a good friend of mine,
Rene,
who's got a place out in the Netherlands,
called Just Fubar Motorcycles.
But yeah.
It's a big, fast.
- Terrifying.
- Powerful.
- Terrifying. - Motorcycle.
- Terrifying.
- And I can't wait to see you on the back.
This is gonna be fun.
Are you ready? - No.
Forgive me.
But it had to be done.
Anyway.
We've filmed this whole thing, right?
And we've got all the footage
and I've cut it down.
But that doesn't mean it's finished.
Because if you want things to be truly professional,
then we need two more things.
We need a soundtrack.
Because obviously we can't use
the existing soundtrack.
We don't have the license for that,
and they're probably unlikely to grant it
for a pastiche.
And secondly, we need color grading.
Because, you know,
with a really nice camera,
you'll capture loads of information
and that lets you kind of set a feel
and a style and a tone.
And obviously we had a reference material here.
We had a kind of reference look
from that first commercial.
But England is not California.
And so again, the color grade needed to
make the whole thing feel kind of coherent.
And for both of those things, again,
we turned to Fiverr.
And again, you can find loads
of really talented professionals on Fiverr
to do this kind of work.
And the results,
well, I guess it is time to see the results,
isn't it?
It's not for De'Longhi, I should make that clear.
It's just built upon the
perfume ad that,
you know, Brad and Damien made.
But now it's time for me to stop talking
and to show you the work that
collectively we have made
with the generous support of Fiverr.
And honestly,
I make coffee videos on YouTube.
At no point that I think I would get to make
something like this.
After I show it to you,
after this strange tribute to Brad Pitt's
weird coffee commercial airs,
I will talk through just a few of my favorite things
from the whole experience,
before we kind of wrap up.
So, I'll be back with you
in a little bit over a minute.
I hope you enjoyed that.
And if you've watched that and thought,
well maybe I wanna hire some professionals through Fiverr,
then do make sure you click the link
in the description down below,
or use code JamesHoffmann to get 10% off
any of your orders you place through Fiverr.
And I have to say thank you to them
for agreeing to let me do something
this completely bizarre
and wonderful and fun.
And I hope for you,
it was a little bit of entertainment as well.
For me,
there were some highlights of the whole thing.
It was just, it's the, you know,
it's the biggest production that I've worked on
like this, it's the most crew.
And as a result,
I learned a lot from it, right?
That for me,
it's just a constant learning experience.
And that was amazing
to get to work with people who
have just way more skill in every aspect
of what they do, than I do.
And for me, that was a real, real pleasure.
And I'm grateful to all of them.
They were amazing.
I have to say that there's this kind
of weird memory I will always have,
which is where we've closed Beachy Head
and we're riding along
and there's this big truck
with like someone stuck on the top of it,
in a slightly terrifying way, filming us.
And I look across
and there's like 20 or 30 people
who are just visiting the area,
who've just stopped.
And they have no idea what's going on,
but they're filming madly with their camera phones.
They have no idea who I am or what this is.
And it was just this weird, strange,
glorious, singular moment that
I will treasure in this strange way.
Also, it was a weirdly animal-filled trip.
I did not expect the range of
animals that we experienced in this trip
to be hanging out with us
as we were trying to make a strange coffee commercial.
But overall,
I learned a ton.
It was a lot of fun.
I am very grateful again to Brad actually,
shout out to Brad for being incredibly patient
with all of this.
And for riding around
and just having some fun with it all too.
A link to Dark Arts is down the description below.
Go and check them out if you wanna do that.
But yeah, thank you again to Brad and his terrifying,
terrifying, terrifying motorcycle.
But now, I wanna hear from you,
how did you find that?
Was that fun?
This is not gonna be a regular occurrence on the channel.
No one's just gonna give me budget to go
and make these bizarre movies
so I hoped you enjoyed this particular one.
Let me know your thoughts down in the comments below.
But for now,
I'll say thank you so much for watching
and I hope you have a great day.