Lights...Camera...Skydive?
By Musika Farnsworth

A mail-order movie rental company recently used skydiving to help sell its product. The company produced a TV commercial in which it hopes to encourage viewers to do something they haven’t tried before—renting movies through the mail. The ad uses a comedic approach to compare two activities it assumes viewers haven’t tried—skydiving and mail-order movie rental—showing one as quite challenging, the other as very simple.

The skydiving scene shows a very nervous young man about to make his first jump standing in an airplane door with a skyboard strapped to his feet. Inside the door, an intense military jumpmaster urges him to jump. The student finally takes the leap.

The production company’s stylist had to research and find the appropriate clothes and equipment for the shoot. Luckily, Oregon skydiver Terry Hoffman is also a sound technician with the company. He not only explained what skydivers wear, but provided all the gear.

The commercial included six actors playing skydivers—the primary student, the jumpmaster and four extras. None of the actors would have to actually make a skydive for the shoot. The crew would film the actors in the plane on the ground, with fans and other equipment simulating the in-air action.

For the simulated skydiving scene, actor Nate Hallaran had to jump out of the plane and land on a cushion placed on a platform. To make it look like the plane was actually flying at altitude, the crew set up a four-cylinder fan near the wing, with two more fans on top of the wing blowing across the door.

Every detail the audience sees requires meticulous planning. The skydiving scene took four-and-a-half hours to film but will amount to three-and-a-half seconds of the entire commercial. Still, when it airs, it will hopefully entertain both jumpers and non-jumpers alike.

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