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Where Film Meets Clip: Inside a TV Ad Shoot

4 min read

The Little Rock team that filmed three recent TV commercials for Sport Clips Haircuts was aiming at a young audience: 18- to 30-year-old guys.

But their first test subject was far younger.

“I showed my 7-year-old daughter the spots and asked her to read aloud everything she saw,” said Katy Bartlett, associate director of broadcast for 360 Filmworks, the film production unit of marketing agency Stone Ward. She figured that if her little Alyson could absorb the messages, a multitude of male 20-somethings could, too.

The 30-second commercials, filmed in Little Rock, use strong rhythms, bright visuals and bold fonts to promote “guy-smart” styling. There’s no announcer, and except for a few blocks of type shouting lines like “get your hair in the game,” “MVP Experience” and “hair this good deserves its own walk-up music,” they could be smartly cut music videos.

For nine years, Stone Ward and 360 Filmworks have produced Sport Clips’ national TV commercials in central Arkansas. Last month, Bartlett joined team members Danny Koteras, Tommy Walker and Dustin Jones to provide a glimpse inside the latest shoot, which included 41 local actors, 12 subcontracted crew members and a team of eight from Stone Ward/360.

The ads, which began rolling out in September on ESPN and Fox Sports, showcase a sports-saturated atmosphere, from the shop’s big-screen TVs to the murals above the mirrors to the hardwood floor. The door to the back rooms is labeled “showers.” It’s all designed to grab men by the hair.

“Sport Clips will cut women’s hair, but they specialize in guys,” said Koteras, Stone Ward’s creative director. “They compete more with the local barbershop than the Great Clips or Super Cuts of the world. The thing that Sport Clips has over competitors is the sports focus, and the fact that they’re really focused on styling for men and boys. If you want to chat it up with your stylist, they’re trained to do that; if you want to be quiet, you can do that, too.”

360 Filmworks took over the Sport Clips location in west Little Rock for three long nights of shooting in July, complete with 2 a.m. “lunches” from RX Catering and lessons for actresses on the proper way to hold scissors.

So shooting wouldn’t interrupt daily business at the shop, one of more than 20 Sport Clips locations in Arkansas, everyone gathered about 6:30 p.m. in the parking lot at 12800 Chenal Parkway and finally left at 7 or 7:30 a.m. The overnight shoots culminated weeks of planning and featured local technical crews and all-Arkansas “talent” — the attractive actors portraying the stylists and their customers. Behind the camera, real Arkansas Sport Clips stylists wielded the clippers; after all, the haircuts were real.

“One guy had shoulder-length hair and we cut it all off. Another had a long beard that we sheared,” Bartlett said.

“When you see those transformations, it’s all local guys,” Koteras said. “We had casting sessions [including an open call at the Holiday Inn Presidential that drew 200 hopefuls] and asked people to walk toward us, do little dances. The last question was are you willing to let us do anything we want with your hair. And if they said no, they didn’t make the cut.”

In the ads, the guys beaming about their new looks weren’t actually seeing themselves. “They were staring at a camera, not a mirror, so they had no idea what they looked like. We’re telling them ‘smile like you love it,’ but they haven’t seen a thing,” Bartlett said, laughing.

Sport Clips, based outside Austin, Texas, had some 400 shops when it became a Stone Ward client nearly 11 years ago. “Now they have 1,700 locations in all 50 states, and they’re in Canada,” Koteras said. The chain has earned several top-10 rankings from Forbes magazine as a Best Franchise to Buy.

Walker, the director of broadcast productions, said he spent 16 years as a grip in Memphis, working on big Hollywood films like “The Firm” and “A Time to Kill.” “I know what a major movie shoot looks like, and what it takes to do a high-quality production, and we’re lucky we can do that right here in Little Rock.”

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