Reliant Energy - Troy Aikman
“When we were briefed on this TV campaign for Reliant, I was told that the client wanted Troy Aikman to say 'I really love Reliant' or something like that. I thought man, there has to be a better way than that. So I basically came up with this idea of Troy wanting to endorse Reliant, but Reliant not needing celebrity endorsements. Doing it this way gave me the opportunity to have a ridiculous agent who wants Troy to endorse all of these totally silly products instead of Reliant.”
“We did four spots based on this theme, so I got to come up with these dumb products like the Dental Gun that shoots your mouth clean, or Edible Shade that makes you sweat sunscreen. It was all that sort of thing. The great interplay between Jonathan Pessin, who played the agent, and Troy made the spots.”
“At first, Troy just seemed to want to do his thing, say his lines, and go home. But eventually he seemed to let his guard down a little and get into the humor. That’s when it got really fun. We only had Troy for part of one day, so we had to shoot the first commercials really efficiently. These first spots went really well for Reliant, so we got to do a couple more. It was even more fun the second time around because Jonathan and Troy had some chemistry established. Plus Troy knew we weren’t going to make him look foolish. He really liked the campaign.”
“We had a great team on these shoots including Jim Frohna as DP. Jim is an LA DP that I have worked with quite a bit. In fact, Jim just shot Jill Soloway’s film, ‘Afternoon Delight’ which won at Sundance this past year. Jim was a guy who really helped me out when I first started directing. He happily let me learn and grow.”
