When it comes to playfulness, joy pays dividends
World War Seven Managing Director and Partner, Sloane Skala, believes that the atmosphere on a set, the camaraderie and the joyfulness, leaches into the work. If you're attempting to make a comedy spot but things are tense and clients are anxious, building playfulness into the whole operation lights the fuse for creativity.
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There's often a strange irony at the heart of comedy production. In theory, the whole point is to make something that feels light, spontaneous, joyous… and yet, the process of getting there can be anything but.
We all know the drill; tense sets, anxious clients, tight timelines, directors trying to make magic in a space where the air is thick with stress. You can feel immediately when you walk onto a set when it isn't working, everyone's trying too hard, and trying too hard is the enemy of funny.
The energy on set doesn't stay on set, it lives in the work. If the room feels guarded, the performances will, too.
We make a lot of comedy at World War Seven. It's kind of our whole thing. And we've spent a lot of time thinking about this problem – not just as a means to an end, but as a general philosophy. What we've learned is this: the energy on set doesn't stay on set, it lives in the work. If the room feels guarded, the performances will, too. But if the room feels genuinely alive - playful, collaborative, a little irreverent - that quality finds its way into the frame. The camera picks up on it. Audiences feel it, even if they can’t articulate why.
Above: The pressures of commercial filmmaking can make a set feel tense, but the energy and atmosphere of a set leaks into the work, says Skala.
The answer is to build play into the process itself. Not as a gimmick, not as a cringey, team-building exercise, but as a genuine operating principle. Because the only way to make something actually funny is to stop taking it all so seriously and try to make each other laugh behind the camera, too.
There's a levity to incorporating play, a signal that says, 'we're all in this together, we're not taking ourselves too seriously, and in addition to making good work, we intend to have a good time'.
There's a levity to incorporating play, a signal that says, 'we're all in this together.
On set, it can show up in small ways. Buying matching tracksuits in the brand colour for a 35-person video village to wear for a yearbook photo on the last shoot day. Pranking the director on a prom-themed spot who showed up to the first shoot day to find the entire crew wearing t-shirts with his prom photo on them. Hiring a portrait artist to quietly sketch everyone at video village and leave portraits for them to find on their seats when they return from lunch. All the department heads showing up to the last shoot day dressed as the director.
When you create these moments, the client doesn't feel like a guest at someone else's party because it’s their party as well... and the gaffer’s, and the set decorator's, and the mobile home driver’s.
Above: Director David Shafei on set for a Geico shoot.
Off set, remember to invest in actual, human connection. Host team nights (no clients). Make s'mores around a campfire and sing tequila-fuelled karaoke at each other. Have department head dinners at The Smoke House the night before the shoot. Bond Old Hollywood style over (one) martini, and get battle ready together. We used to host PPMs at our former office and invite the clients to bring a swimsuit. We’d fire up the BBQ, have a little grill and swim, and get to know each other after fittings. Or even just client dinners where, god forbid, people actually talk to each other.
Joy, it turns out, has real business value; it's not the opposite of professionalism.
These moments are how you build the trust that makes people willing to take risks on camera, to try the thing that might not work, to stay open to the unexpected. In a high-pressure situation, the freedom to fail needs to be consciously built. Otherwise, it won’t exist. After all, the best comedy moments on a commercial set are almost never in the script as written. They happen when the cast and crew feel safe enough to play. So, create the conditions where that happens.
What we're really talking about is building the conditions for joy. And joy, it turns out, has real business value; it's not the opposite of professionalism. When clients have a genuinely great experience on a shoot - when they leave energised, rather than ground down - they come back. They trust you enough to take creative risks. And they refer their colleagues. The experience itself becomes part of the pitch… becomes lore, even.
Above: Director Sheena Brady finds joy on the set of a Snyders commercial.
But play has to be grounded in something real. Chaos isn't the same as creativity. Looseness isn't the same as lack of preparation. Here’s the trick: genuine playfulness on set requires a foundation of enormous clarity and care. You have to do the work beforehand; the deep thinking about what the spot is trying to do, the honest conversations with the agency and client about what success (and failure) looks like, the careful preparation that means everyone arrives on the day with the same goal.
It requires empathy, perhaps the most underestimated yet most valuable element in production culture. Clients are usually walking onto set carrying a huge amount of pressure: budget accountability, stakeholder management, impossible timelines, the anxiety of not being in control. If you assume everyone is there to have fun and get loose, without first acknowledging the weight people are carrying, then playfulness reads as tone-deaf. The first job is always to make people feel seen, safe and taken care of. The fun follows from that.
Play has to be grounded in something real. Chaos isn't the same as creativity. Looseness isn't the same as lack of preparation.
Comedy is a genre that demands a specific kind of vulnerability. You are, in the most literal sense, asking human beings to make fools of themselves in front of a camera. The performance you want - relaxed, spontaneous, alive - is almost impossible to access when the room feels guarded. The least we can do is build a space where that feels safe and where the evolutionary instinct to self-protect gets replaced, just for a day, with something closer to play.
The best kind of comedy looks like a magic trick. One where the audience is none the wiser that, behind the scenes, people were genuinely cracking each other up. The goal is not just to make funny commercials, but to build a place where the making itself feels worth showing up for.
Because the best work doesn't just look fun. Somewhere in the room where it was made, someone was belly laughing. You can always tell.
