Pre-Production

Matt Bucur (one of the owners of MDRN Athlete), reached out to us about wanting to create a handful of films for his supplement company. However, it came with a message he wanted to share. He wanted something different for the supplement world. Something not so intense and more so relatable.

Prying a bit more we found that he wanted a message that multiple types of people could relate too. A message that a body builder and a jogger could share. That’s when it hit me. The “Moment” we shared with him this idea of a moment everyone has. In life decisions, in daily decisions, and in fitness decisions. This moment is essentially a fork in the road. You get tired and are faced with the decision to give up or to push harder and further. Usually there is greater reward when you work harder and press on.

We decided to showcase a few different types of fitness all having that moment and all moving forward. A gym rat, cross fit female, jogger/yogi, and a rugged active guy.

Production

On production day 1, we hit the road around 5am to get to New Port Beach in time to start filming at a gym around noon. We wanted the gym to be minimal but also be able to film multiple people and make it look like different locations.

While at the gym, we recorded a ton of sounds from breathing and foot steps, to an alarm clock, weights clanking, and ropes hitting the ground. After each scene we stopped to record those sounds separately

Production – The Dark Room

Similar to Unclad Grain, we wanted a dark room where the lead character could essentially be experiencing that moment. The inner battle and struggle of fighting laziness and fatigue. Fighting the lack of motivation and pressing on. The dark room represents yourself in that moment.

We blacked out the spin room at the gym and set up two Arri 500’s on the sides of Matt. Also used a small LED Torch light and placed it in front of him but dimmed it down a bit. This way he could have a nice outline from the back lighting and some contrasting shadows, but also have some light on his face so you could see his expression

Production – The Beach

After the gym we headed straight to the beach to film our jogger. We got lucky with it being a Saturday and no one really being there. Then again… it was December and freaking cold. Our actress Brittany Martinez was so great and killed it.

We filmed her jogging as the sun was going down so that we could have that nice back lighting. Once the sun was down with some blue hour light we managed to get some great shots of her doing some yoga poses.

Production – The Kitchen

On our second day of filming, we needed to get some great product shots in and use a kitchen that was very appealing. Luckily, Matt’s sister-in-law had a beach house in Manhattan Beach with a newly renovated kitchen.

We also managed to film some killer short product films for them in there.

Post Production

We wanted people to feel the moment. Feel the out of breath tired moment. Thats why we chose to make the beginning a little fast paced with Matt’s dark room scene slow. The idea behind the edit was to make the workouts fast so you felt tired but make the internal battle and struggle slow and feel real.