Responses by Tim Roan, chief creative officer, McJ.

Background: We set out to let shoppers know that everything they love from the grocery store is now in their phone on the app Instacart. Since this was a co-marketing assignment with Instacart and ShopRite Supermarkets, we had to thread the branding needle for both clients to succeed as the grocery delivery solution.

Design thinking: We thought: ‘If ShopRite is on Instacart and Instacart is on your phone, what’s the simplest visual story we could tell?’ We explored a number of ways in, as one does: a lot of it was “why you need Instacart” but our final idea felt smarter because it hit “how Instacart works” with an emphasis on ease and immediacy.

Challenges: People aren’t amazed by CG anymore. So, the challenge was to pull this off in camera with old-timey prop-master approaches. So much of the credit goes to the director Mike Long: his treatment was “let’s go practical; the reward will be better.” He even suggested casting magicians who were great at sleight of hand. He also stressed the importance of getting amazing prop master Matt Dayton and starting tests weeks in advance.

Favorite details: The casting. We found some lovely faces by casting locally in Austin, shooting the spot outside of Austin with a locally based crew. We shot it all—plus a few more scenes that didn’t fit into 30 seconds—in a ten-hour day. We also spent time rehearsing the tricks, so the shoot day was smooth, although the line producer was sweating the hours.

Visual influences: We went into this spot thinking: ‘How would they have filmed this 50 years ago?’ Long made that call and was spot on, bringing a fresh perspective. It gave us all a rigor on how to crack camera perspective and prop tricks.

Time constraints: We had to move fast—ten weeks from brief to shipping the film—so we embraced that by going with super-simple storytelling in one location.

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