These are excerpts from a half-hour infomercial for Masterbuilt Manufacturing’s Turk ‘n’ Surf Electric Turkey Fryer which played nationally. The project initiated through Danny East of Masterbuilt who contacted Allen Matthews of Digital Edge Productions to shoot the show. Allen, who is an extremely talented videographer,called on me to produce the project, to bring together all of the crew and services necessary for a project of this magnitude. Danny East, the inventor of the electric turkey fryer, and I wrote the infommercial–after we’d each watched countless hours of similar projects–with the goal of setting the bar just a bit higher than the average infomercial. Danny and I have had the pleasure of working together on several shoots since then, most recently on a day-long music video shoot. Altogether, there were more than twenty crew members on the shoot and numerous support personnel, plus our talent Michelle Torres of HGTV and the mclamore brothers who own Masterbuilt. The location shoot at my friend Bill Jordan’s huntin lodge required two full days. Post production? You don’t even want to know. While I had a firm grasp on the required production techniques, equipment, electrical requirements, lighting, makeup, food styling, set design, camera techniwues, etc., it was my good friend Barry Jacobs in LA who gave us invaluable advice on infomercial structure and the commercials within the informercial.
