The Zebra gives you one less thing to worry about

The brief could fit on a sticky note. The Zebra wanted something funny, they wanted it fast, and they needed each spot to hit a different audience segment. 

"My instinct from the start was to build absurd, eye-catching situations that would grab people mid-scroll and act as an entertaining container for each specific brand message we needed to deliver. Creative director Josh DiMarcantonio and I went through multiple rounds with the client before everyone fell in love with this idea of people casually venting about their daily problems while something genuinely terrible is happening to them. Thanks to The Zebra, at least insurance is one less thing they have to worry about." said director Zack Seckler.

Seckler adds: "There was a definite production puzzle to solve: four completely different visual worlds, one shoot day. We built the whole concept around shooting on a virtual production LED volume at Be Electric in Brooklyn, which meant we could go from a jungle at night to a sunswept Colorado mountaintop to a city skyline without leaving the building. That was the best way to pull this off in a day and have each spot feel like its own world."

Jungle Rotisserie: We built a custom spit rig out of steel, counterbalance weights, and a gear system, operated by two SFX stunt people who manually rotated the talent. The tricky part was syncing the rotation speed to the dialogue. He's delivering lines to camera every time he comes around, so the timing had to feel effortless, even though nothing about strapping a guy to a rotating steel rig is. This was the first setup we shot, and when crew started walking in that morning, people genuinely thought we built out a full jungle set. We layered real foliage in front of the LED wall, built out an entire Unreal Engine environment with mist and moving plants, and lit it so everything married together. The flames, sparks, and heat waves were added in VFX to bring it home.

Falconer: The talent was in a full body harness connected to a pulley system rigged from the ceiling, operated by two SFX people who could move her up and down to sell the feeling that she's airborne. We did pre-vis models of the eagle first to lock in size, look, and flight pattern, then matched the final animation to her real pulley movements after the shoot. The bird itself was built from elements in Photoshop, using real pieces from our live action like the glove on her hand to help the composite blend, then animated using AI. The desert canyon she's flying over is footage I happened to shoot myself on a cinema drone out West a while back. I picked a sequence that subtly carries her higher and higher into the sky throughout the spot, raising the stakes with every wingbeat. The big production challenge was the wind. To get her hair whipping convincingly, we had to blast a fan at full volume right at her face, which made capturing usable dialogue almost impossible. We spent a lot of time in a sound booth after the shoot recording wild lines and lip-syncing everything in post. The line that always kills me is "my mom called my new haircut brave," which our creative director Josh came up with as an alt on the day.