Making Dreams Come True for the Affinity Steel Super Bowl 2026 Television Commercial
We’ve been working with Affinity Steel for nearly 10 years. This year, Brandon (owner) had a dream (literally) and wanted to make it a reality for the Affinity Steel Super Bowl 2026 commercial.
Pre-Production
The pre-production, although seemingly simple, was quite the undertaking.
Writing the Script
By this time, creative juices were limited and Ross was pretty tapped on the script writing process. That’s where Jacob took over.
Pounding away at the keys, he managed to get everything Brandon wanted and to cram it all into 30 seconds.
Again, after some small revisions, the script was approved and set in stone.
Casting
With the script locked, it was time to get to casting.
In previous years, budgeting wasn’t an issue and we started looking to hire out some acting talent that we had worked with before, currently out of Las Vegas, NV. Our friend, Jeff Nicholson, was going to take on the role of Woody (the primary wood salesman) and he had a friend in Los Angeles who we were looking to cast for Splinter (the twitchy sidekick).
After getting the actors committed we were hit with a huge budget cut.
We were going to have to source talent elsewhere.
Ultimately, we ended up casting Brandon Thomason as Woody, and our brother, Reed, as Splinter.
Costuming for a Super Bowl TV Ad
For our salesmen, we needed a very specific look.
Ross took to Amazon to get some matching Buffalo plaid shirts, while Jacob designed the name patches.
We sourced the custom embroidered patches from a print-on-demand company that has no order minimum requirements.
As we inched towards the video production on this Super Bowl commercial, Ross sent Jacob to Hobby Lobby to get a blank black truckers hat for Woody and Walmart for a trappers hat for Splinter.
Once all the pieces arrived, our lovely mother sewed the name patches on the shirts and we were off to the races.
Building the Video Production Crew
We knew this was going to be a skeleton crew type of shoot and we had to act fast to get everyone around
Every video production that Hamil Bros Studios takes on will have Jacob and Ross.
Since the summer of 2025, Ross’ wife, Haley, has been helping a lot and this shoot was no different.
The last piece of the puzzle was going to be bringing in someone who could run sound and be an extra set of hands.
For this role, we reached out to the tried and true Landon Lipinski, who was also our extra help on the Affinity Steel Super Bowl commercials last year.
Landon was willing and able.
We had our crew.
Building The Concept
Selling Wood at a Steel Shop
Back in June of 2025, we were tasked with coming up with the concepts for the Affinity Steel Super Bowl commercials.
We came up with several home-run ideas and pitched them to Affinity Steel.
The two best were voted on and selected and we began the process of writing up scripts.
Not long after, Brandon reached out and said he wanted to pivot to a Landman-type idea. The show takes place in Midland and the greater West Texas area and he thought that would resonate with the local market.
Not having seen the show, we took the time to watch the first season and put in the research on the ads.
Pretty soon, we had new scripts. After a few small revisions, we had the scripts approved.
We were working on budget for these ads when we got another email from Brandon.
“I had a dream last night of a couple of wood salesmen coming to Affinity Steel trying to sell us wood and they end up asking for job applications.”
After several months and several scripts, we were locked in. The ad would be about wood salesmen.
Explore the Affinity Steel Gear Package
Production day arrived and we were headed from Lubbock to Midland. West Texas may feel small but it’s still about a 2 hour drive.
We descended upon Affinity Steel about 9am and began unloading the trailer.
Part of the way into getting things unloaded, Brandon came out and wanted to get a run-through of what production was going to look like and add some things to the shot list.
This was fairly quick and we were back to unloading and building.
Camera Package and Getting the First Shot
Executing the first shot of the day is often the biggest hurdle, especially on commercials or shoots with several setups.
Our first shot was going to have our wood salesmen walking into the store, scoping the place out.
For this, we rigged our Blackmagic Pyxis with the Tokina Cinema Vista 25mm and mounted it all to our Dana Dolly.
For the first time in a while, we actually ran the dolly manually.
We got a few takes in the can and we were ready to move onto a more permanent setup: the main interaction between the wood salesmen and the Affinity Steel employee.
Coverage, Coverage, and More Coverage
Capturing the Wood Salesmen
Originally we had planned on shooting triple coverage of all of the talent in order to maximize the amount of footage we could get, but the footprint would have been too large for that, so, for our wood salesmen angle we set up the Pyxis with our Tokina Vista 50mm and our Blackmagic Cinema Camera Full Frame 6k with a Tokina Vista 105.
This allowed us to get a medium shot and a closer detail shot in case we got any great reactions.
Light it Up
Given the limited amount of time we had to stay on budget, we opted for a relatively simple 3-light approach.
For our key light we rigged our 8×8 frame with our Matthews Voodoo Cloth and punched our Aputure 600C Pro through it at about 3200k to match the room lights.
This was positioned over the front counter to give us as much luminance as possible.
Next, we placed our Aputure Nova P300c on a baby stand and rigged that as our backlight for our wood salesmen.
Finally, we set up our Amaran 300c on a baby stand with an Amaran Light Dome Mini for our fill light.
The Sky's the Limit
Making the Best of a Bad Day
If you’re familiar with West Texas, you know that the weather will absolutely do whatever is opposite to what you need.
If you work in video production, you know that your exterior environment will also work against you.
Both were the case on this day.
We needed an exterior shot of the front of the Affinity Steel location that would introduce the store and our characters.
The first problem was that the wind was blowing moderately hard and that meant no lighting, and definitely no diffusion on the light. We would have to go au naturale.
The second problem was that there was a real estate development across the street with tractors dragging dirt.
It doesn’t take much imagination to assume that between the dirt and the wind, we were not having a good time.
The sky was brown and we all had dirt in our teeth. Our characters did their part well, but the sky was, how do I say it? Poopy.
The sky was brown and that was going to hurt the aesthetic of the shot.
Not to worry though, if you remember our Champion Xpress job, we had to deal with wind and dirt there too and we made it happen and look great.
Shortly after, we made our way to lunch for a quick break and something to eat.
We were making really good time.
Working with Non-Actors
We saved what we surmised would be the most difficult shots for the very last.
Every year, at least one Affinity Steel employee gets highlighted in the commercials.
This year was no exception.
We always have a little bit of hesitation when it comes to putting an employee on camera. Either it works or it doesn’t.
We got lucky this year. Damian did a really good job. It took a few takes for him to get comfortable, but, in the end it comes down to the director to get the best results possible.
In this case, all it took was letting Damian know that he could be as annoyed with the putzes of wood salesmen as he wanted.
These guys were coming in and blindly trying to sell something that wasn’t going to be worth anything to him and they were going to be pushy.
It didn’t take nearly as long to get his shots done as we had planned for, so that meant we could get some extra shots and wrap early, getting Landon on his way back to DFW and us on our way back to Lubbock.
The Last Bits at Affinity Steel
While Haley and Ross worked on breaking down the lights, Jacob grabbed a few shots of some of the wood profile samples inside.
Not long after those shots were captured, Ross went outside to get some of the larger wood profile displays in front of the Affinity Steel entrance.
Post Production
Back at the Hamil Bros Studios Headquarters
We made the trek back to Lubbock and, the very next morning, we immediately began the edit on this ad.
It was a fairly quick prospect since we didn’t have a ton of footage to cull through.
The ad was cut and dry and didn’t leave a whole lot of room for creativity.
The shining moment in the entire process was getting to clean up the store front from the poopy sky.
Using a combination of After Effects, Red Giant Tools, and some other products that we’ve acquired over the years.
Fortunately, when shooting the initial shot, our wood salesmen didn’t really cross into the view of the sky, which made rotoscoping the building out a lot easier.
First thing, Ross motion tracked the scene so that our sky would move with the camera.
We really wanted a nice looking sky, so, after getting the sky removed, Ross took to Video Copilot’s Orb plugin and used a 360 HD sky to place our new sky in. He rotated the sky map until the sun was in approximately the correct position.
To give the sky some life he used some flying birds from ActionVFX which is always a good tool to make a still image feel like footage.
Delivery
After a round of revisions, we had Affinity Steel’s approval and it was time to get the ad ready for broadcast and get a Spanish version done.
With the tight deadline on this it was quite the undertaking, but not as big as our Super Bowl ad for Spencer Dobbs this year, but more on that later…
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