Gear Up - HP CKO Opening Video

HP wanted its sales leadership kickoff to open with the kind of intensity of an Under Armour commercial, built around the theme 'Gear Up,' in front of a room of senior leaders and the sales organization's leadership.

HP brought in Gorilla Creative, a corporate video production company in the San Francisco Bay Area, to produce it. Sixty seconds, delivered for a stage screen more than five times wider than it was tall.

The Challenge

A sports commercial is one of the biggest things you can put a camera in front of. Athletes, locations, real action, and a crew large enough to catch all of it. That's the look the reference set, and it's a scale of production a sixty second internal opener doesn't come with.

The screen shape was its own problem. At more than five times wider than tall, every frame is a letterbox strip, and footage that wasn't framed for that shape mostly doesn't survive the crop.

And it still had to feel like HP rather than an impression of a sportswear brand.

Our Approach

Our first concept included a production day. We'd cast two actors, light a dramatic set to look like a dark locker room, and film them delivering the thematic lines. We took it out. The idea was solid, but the shoot would have added complexity and hurdles to an already short schedule, and after some discussion with the team at HP, we decided that this wouldn't increase the effectiveness of the video enough to warrant the added time and cost.

That put all the weight on stock footage. Our search went beyond the typical stock licensing sources to find the footage we needed. Clips have to agree with each other on light, lens, grain, and motion before they'll cut together as one film without feeling like stock footage. And the screen aspect ratio narrowed our selection even further, because on a screen that wide, whatever matters in a frame often sits above or below the part you get to keep.

With nobody on camera to deliver the thematic lines, kinetic type needed to carry the message.

In post we used a combination of slow motion, speed ramping, jump cuts, and camera moves to create a sense of energy, tension, and momentum. Careful color grading across every clip turns footage from a dozen different sources into a single piece. And sound design brings stock footage to life and makes it real.

The Outcome

Stock footage stops reading as stock footage when it's chosen carefully, cropped deliberately, given sound design, and graded as one thing. That's where the value delivered on the original ask.

HP got the opening video they needed with the intensity of the reference they brought us and without the cost or time required to film original footage.