Yamaha | It’s Never Too Late

Story

Our spec campaign for Yamaha is about the one thing a man did quit, and what it cost him to return to it decades later. It was one of my biggest pieces: a lot of locations and a lot of night shoots, all on a deadline for the Clios and the Young Ones. A week before the shoot, the recital hall we’d lined up fell through. I found another one by googling. They don’t normally let people film, so we talked with them, showed them the concept and walked them through it. We came in late on a night with no recitals, so we wouldn’t get in their way.

It started with a goofy conversation about people who quit piano and wish they could still play, and it got pushed into a much bigger concept. It was my first big project across a lot of locations, with some late-night shoots, and at one point we thought we’d lost all the footage, until we found it on a card that hadn’t been formatted. We had so much that we ended up making three different cuts.

I helped come up with the concept and worked on every version of the script with Zack, who wrote and directed it. There were three or four, for how we’d tell the story and how we’d cut it with the montage and the flashbacks. I helped piece that together, going back and forth with the professor.

I did the casting and the locations, and on the shoot days I was the first AD and the gaffer. In the college flashback, I’m the one in the number 5 jersey, because our second actor backed out.