Champion Xpress Car Wash | Spring 2024 | Feel Better Campaign

When we said 2024 was kicking off with a bang, we had no idea just how true that was. Back in January, we got a call from Amy Wood at Flint Avenue Marketing here in Lubbock. She gave us a little rundown on a client that she said needed a commercial campaign and she wanted us to come have a meeting with Flint and this client. We’re always glad to have a meeting and check out the landscape of a project, so we met up and set a really incredible video project in motion for our production company. Without further ado, we present the top level of the Champion Xpress Car Wash Spring 2024 “Feel Better” Campaign.
The Concepts
When we initially sat down with Flint Avenue and Champion, the ideas started to flow. The concepting phase had to happen relatively quickly due to the nature of the project, so as soon as we were done with the first meeting, we hammered down on concepts for this campaign. After a few back and forth conversations, we landed on what you just watched above. We had a lot of fun writing the ads, but that’s just where the work began, we were going to have to also make sure that the ads could happen. Pre-production was going to make or break this project and we preferred to make it.


Pre-production
As soon as we knew the requirements of the project, we immediately reached out to William Hellmuth, Director of Photography, to see what his availability was. In our conversations, William told us that he had the perfect producer in mind. That producer was J Scott Worthington. Now these names might ring the inkling of a bell in your mind, because we’ve had the pleasure of working with William and J before on two occasions. The first was the short film “Alone” in which we did visual effects for UI design and screen replacement / compositing. The next being a beautiful short film called “Dixieland” (starring Tony Todd) where we did a lot of green screen replacement, set building, and various other visual effects. William and J have worked together for years and as soon as we made the phone calls, they were ready. Let’s just be clear, this amount of pre-production takes an immense amount of work and they did a stellar job.
The Shoot
I think it’s safe to say that this production was our single largest production to date. We had between 25-35 crew members and talent on set for every single day we rolled cameras. We shot in Champion’s main hub of Albuquerque, NM and sourced various crew locally as well as California and Texas. We had five days to pull off essentially 3 ad sets: Life Happens, Hard Work, and Nap Time. Those five days were pretty intense to try to pull off three relatively different concepts, but with our exceptionally talented crew, we were able to crush every day as it happened.
On Location: The Ranch
Our first two days took place at Christian’s Nevermind Ranch out in Edgewood, NM and that location was absolutely gorgeous. It’s a really cool modern ranch with all the ranch animals to boot. The landscape was stunning and we were very lucky to get such gorgeous footage all in the two days we had scheduled there. Big shoutout to everyone at Christian’s for helping us navigate the ranch every step of the way as well as to the owner for letting us do dirty things to his Denali. For this set of commercials, we wanted the feel to be more on the cinematic side as opposed to feeling “commercial”. It had all the lens flares, all the rugged outdoors, and the beautiful vistas to boot. The early mornings (and copious amounts of coffee) were worth it as the production crew tackled every potential roadblock before any of them became an issue. We got dirty and windswept, but we think the results are worth it.


On location: The Hero Car Wash
Since we were shooting ads for a car wash, we knew we needed the right location for our “hero” car wash. It does not wash heroes, unless you consider William Hellmuth a hero (we certainly do). Anything labeled a “hero” in a video production basically says it’s the top tier visual for that particular thing, place, or person. Champion requested we shoot the Rio Rancho location and after the location scout, we knew why. Look at the backdrop!
This location was beautiful. However, the weather was not beautiful. On this particular day we had 25 mph winds sustained and gusts much higher. Again, the crew was INCREDIBLE and a good portion of the production was centered around this day. Our first order of business after call was car rigging camera for the driving portions of “Nap time”. The grip and electric team did an amazing job rigging for Kerri’s driving portions of the ad. Once we got our regular driving footage, we moved to getting Kerri exiting the car wash so we could keep the same camera setup.
After we removed the car mount rig, we set up for the interaction between Kerri and Bri (the car wash employee). This is a great little interaction. The wind still managed to give us a bit of a hassle, so our amazing grip team went to crafty and grabbed a couple of folding picnic tables to use as wind breaks. [insert wind break wide still] This reduced the amount of wind hitting Bri where it was manageable for us to get her takes. From there, it was just a matter of getting William suited up for the car wash interior (thus earning him the nickname “Wet William”). Townsend (1st AC) and Rebecca (2nd AC) helped William get into his waders and get the camera wrapped up so it was water tight. William trekked through the car multiple times to all the shots and angles of the car getting washed.
The end of the day wrapped with William riding in the car with Kerri to get her profile angle. After that we thought we were done, but the weather decided to cooperate. We had Bri stand in for the establishing shots of Kerri driving up to the wash because our mountain backdrop was significantly cleaner than the first time we shot them.


On location: The Life Home
Our last two days were certainly the most technically complex shoot days we had. This is where we decided to do motion control for this concept. We wanted to show time passing and life happening around this car, but not in a time lapse. We wanted to time jump between moments for this family. We decided to go with Emotimo for our motion control rig because it’s perfectly integrated with Dana Dolly. If that wasn’t complex enough, we also had to time out our talent to get them to perform their actions at the right point on the camera move. Lastly, it took us 2 days to shoot this concept. Our camera team did an amazing job, marking, setting, and duplicating the end of the first day move as the beginning of the second day move. Can you see where that cut happens?

Post Production
Because of the work we did in pre production and production, the post on this job went pretty smoothly. Ross tackled most of the up front edits and all the VFX (there are a lot of VFX in it, but that will come in some blogs later on). Jacob worked on getting the motion graphics just right. Once we got approvals on the longer form ads, we could start whittling down on shorter form edits like the 30 second and 15 second edits. Overall, we had 17 master edits and from that we created over 70 deliverables of varying aspect ratios for various media outlets.
This project was incredible. Champion Xpress was amazing to work with alongside Flint Avenue. Our crew was 12 out of 10! If you want to elevate your business to the next level, video production is a BIG part of that! Give us a shout and we’d love to talk with you about helping your business.

Credits
Director: Ross Hamil
Director of Photography: William Hellmuth
Producer: J Scott Worthington
Producer / BTS : Jacob Hamil
1 Assistant Camera: Townsend Dixon
2 Assistant Camera: Rebecca Baliko
1 Assistant Director : Rachel Rogers
2 Assistant Director: Paul Gleason
Production Operations: Karen Corbett
Digital Imaging Technician: Robert DelTour
Aerial: West Texas Aerials
Gaffer: Mark Lopez
Key Grip: Hunter Rodgers
Grip and Electric Swings: Brianna Robison | Tony Engaldo
Key Production Assistants: Phil Gee | J Wallace
Production Assistants: Nick Hennessy, Mischa DeWait
Production Sound: Scott Ross
Props / Art Department: Derek Bensonhaver, Lorae Caldwell
Hair and Makeup: Madeline McCue
Wardrobe: Jesse Dell
Talent: Kerri Hellmuth, Brian Halley-Allen Russell, John Salazar, Nellie Silentwalker, Sunny the Dog, Jessica Dorsey, Happy the Dog
Animal Wrangler: Amanita Barto