Stand Up to Cancer PSA Diary: Day Three

This one was breezy.  I showed up at the NY Preservation Society building in the village for a photo shoot that's going to be the print portion of the SU2C campaign running concurrently with the TV spots.  It was rainy and miserable and they were running late, but it was all due to them setting up the studio so we wouldn't be electrocuted by the rain.  The thing is, the studio was in a rented Penske Truck that they were driving around the city.  They set up shop outside the preservation building and we did a couple shots that lasted about 15 minutes.  

The campaign is all about shifting attention towards researching a cure for cancer and away from the treatment side (which is where pharmaceutical companies and lobbyists make their money).  We saw mock-ups of the ads while we were in holding and the style they were going for looks really nice.  A lot of bold, compassionate, proud and determined portraits coupled with bits of copy from the manifesto and stats.  Everyone on the crew there was awesome, too from makeup to the lighting guy inside the tiny Penske truck studio to the woman who held the umbrella for me while in transit there and back.  I may never get over someone's job being to hold an umbrella for me :-)

The next day was supposed to be shooting onboard the Staten Island Ferry but I couldn't be there so I don't know who was there or how it went over.  I'm sure it was pretty good--the rain didn't last and it was a pretty tight operation, so I'm confident all will be fine.  I heard a bunch of people say that because we were volunteers we didn't have to participate every day if we couldn't come and that if we were featured previously on film then it was best we not appear too much more since it would be totally weird to recognize the faces in the crowd from five different commercials for the same thing.  Sounds fair, but while we were shooting the film portions I couldn't help thinking,  "Get in the frame, Paco, they can't see you!  Move in a little more so the world can see your face!"

I'm sure someone else got a really good start on their own thing with this Manifesto, cause it's that good.  You read it and you're like, "This is well-written, poetic, has stakes, conveys an argument..."--basically everything you could hope for in a bit of commercial copy.  Usually it's something boring like, "For their patients, doctors and hospitals use Tylenol."  I'll have to wait until I hear something more about the air dates and production information to know more.  The whole enterprise is churning on its own now, out of my hands.  There will be a culminating telethon event on all the networks on September 5th though, so I suppose the campaign will lead up in the weekes or months prior to that.  We'll all see, I guess.