Red Flags.

Feb 21

One day my friend was telling me about her terrible love life and a guy she was interested in. I told her “Shelby, it could not be more obvious you should stay away from that guy if he were standing in a minefield of red flags.” I wrote that phrase down in my notes for shoot ideas. A few weeks later I had ordered 100 red stake flags, 50 feet of red safety pennant flags, and a big red flag for a series of photos.

*Your Ex Standing In A Minefield Of Red Flags.*

*Your Ex Covered Head To Toe In Red Flags.*

Since hiring Kendall McCrae as Vision & Verve’s producer, we were looking for spec commercials we could do to add to our portfolio exactly the kind of work we were looking to create. That’s when the idea of the Red Flags photos came back as the premise for a fake dating app called Red Flags that lets you flag bad dates.

In the past year of online dating, it’s been fun to hear people share their bad date stories, some of which were the inspiration for these commercials (some even word-for-word). Kendall & I wrote the scripts and put a call out for actors. Twilite Lounge, where we had helped another production shoot recently, was kind enough to let us use their space on a Wednesday morning before they opened.

Some of my favorite crew members offered their time to help film, including Matt Munson for lighting, Dave Burt for audio, and Brennan Sapp as assistant camera. Kendall was even pulling double duty as producer and acting in the commercials as the bartender / waitress.

For the closing shots of the bad dates and their red flags, Kendall made better looking and more consistent looking red flags by hand, including 50 red stake flags, 36 feet of red pennant flags, and a 3 ft x 6 ft giant red flag. The actors & I met up in a park a few days after the initial shoot, and they all pitched in to help film and come up with ideas.

For the fake app, I designed a couple pages of the app featuring the actors’ headshots for their dating profile, turned them into little videos and mimed out using the app. I also did the voiceover for each commercial.

Director & Cinematographer: Wesley Kirk

Producer: Kendall McCrae

Audio: David Burt

Gaffer: Matt Munson

Talent: Peter Marsh, Stephanie Marie Oustalet, Shiva Ary, Sasha Singh, Kylie McLaughlin, Sid Dalvi, Ronnie Heart, Ian Grubbs, and Kendall McCrae.