Fun with Plumbing

What do you do when a friend, with many years in the business and tons of credibility, comes to you with a project that needs special attention? They’re starting a new agency and need to need to show a new client the benefits of working with a top-notch production company.

Photos by Nathan Sokul

The answer is, you make the time and put some of your best people on it. Granted the client brought resources of their own: Writing, location, talent, directing and supervising production from beginning to end. That’s not unusual. Bauhaus is accustomed to working with fully staffed agencies that have their own stable of talented professionals. One studio commercial we shot recently for a Spanish-language insurance spot involved a crew of almost a dozen people, most provided by the agency.

In this case, Mindi Oberman, of Local Culture Creative, took a Bauhaus crew on location to the Enchanted Springs Ranch in Boerne for a fanciful shoot that would result in a 30-second spot for Caliente Plumbing. Mindi brought her intern Nathan Sokul, and she also recruited Rick Upton, senior marketing consultant at WOAI-TV for the voiceover.

The shoot went well, with a member of the Caliente team posing as a gunfighter, with wrenches in his holster… facing off with a toilet, an air-conditioning compressor and a water heater. The Old-Western-town set, complete with a bright-blue scrunchie tumbleweed, made the illusion complete as the plumber let the appliances know that there’s a new sheriff in town. Afterwards, Nate wrote in an email, “It was a blast filming with the Bauhaus team, it felt like we were on the set of A Fist Full Dollars!”