Producer Chris Skrundz of Amazing Media took product durability-testing to the next level in a viral video for Motorola’s new Tundra cell phone, currently playing on YouTube.
To illustrate the Tundra’s resilience, the phone was taped to a watermelon, which the Acme Catapult ? basically a giant slingshot ? shot 600-feet across a cornfield into the air, with the product landing unscathed.
Skrundz produced the video for Motorola’s Mobile Products Business Unit. The Tundra cell phone is built to military durability specifications, a fact that the video demonstrates in attention-grabbing fashion.
“The viral started out with the idea of building a giant slingshot,” says Skrundz. “Someone at Motorola found the Acme Catapult website, the first time I’d heard of it, and I ran with the idea to create the video.”
The catapult was built by group of friends in Downstate Tremont as an entertaining device for an annual pumpkin hurling contest in Central Illinois. Since then it’s has been modified to hurl large appliances as it did on the Jay Leno show a few years ago.
In early December, Skrundz and DP Mark Holzman of National Video Documentors, using a Sony HVR-Z1U HD camera, went to Tremont to shoot with actor Stephen Taylor from Chicago’s House Theater Company. Taylor improvised his commentary on the action, adding to the video’s intentionally naturalistic tone.
The goal of any viral video is to create buzz for the product, and therefore should be able to entertain viewers on its own terms.
“You want to push the envelope so people will start talking about what they’ve seen,” says Skrundz, who has become a viral expert by virtue of much of his work being delivered via the internet on clients’ websites.
“When corporations make viral videos, the footage has been so tweaked and polished that it doesn’t have any spontaneity,” Skrundz said. “If you want your viral video to take off, it can’t look manufactured. It’s got to feel real.”
Skrundz edited the footage on the Adobe Production Suite, a program he prefers over Final Cut.
Now in its 14th year of business, Amazing Media works in collaboration with “a great pool of other production professionals whom I subcontract when a project needs any specific area of expertise,” Skrundz says.
Most of his business tends to direct-to-consumer, as opposed to business-to-business, he notes, and a lot of his work is aimed at the 14-30 year old demographic.
Skrundz’ three biggest clients are Midway Games, a 13-year association, for which he produces promotional videos – the most recent for 2-million seller “Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe;” Motorola, producing a mix of consumer-director and internal projects, and American Mattress, since last August producing 10 spot packages.
See the Motorola video at
