When it comes to high-quality, versatile, and cost-effective grills, Char-Griller is prolific. They’ve got an extensive catalog of grills available, and they hired us to give each one a day in the sun! Over the course of a 4-day shoot at two different Atlanta locations, we made 12 different grills look as hot as the coals they hold.

Variety By Ingenuity

We’re not actually talking about the grills here, but our own ingenuity! See, because these grills were sold at different, competing retailers like Lowe’s and Home Depot, many of the videos needed to be visually distinct from one another. We couldn’t just roll one grill after another into a stationary setup; we had to make these 2 locations look like 8 locations!

With a great deal of careful planning, we managed it using a clockwork rotation of setups. Moving in circles around the yards of the homes enabled us to get shots of all the clean grills. Then, prep would begin for cooking shots on grills we’d already shot clean. By the time we made it around the yard and shot our clean grills, our first grill had some delicious food on it, and we were ready to shoot it!

It sounds simple, but trust us: it wasn’t. Director Jordan Nowlin’s vision of gorgeous, slow-motion food beauties, paired with high-action speed ramps came together, and we returned victorious, exhausted, and smelling of smoke.

Excuse Me, I Speak “Grill”

Of course, through scripting these videos and planning the shoot, several members of our team developed an acute grill vocabulary. This proved extremely useful when we got into post-production because – despite what you may think – grills be complicated!

Our extensive knowledge of the products through the previous stages of the shoot enabled our editors to know what they were looking at, simplifying things tremendously. It’s times like these that we’re glad we can take projects from script-to-screen, because without that hard-won information, we would’ve been out of the ash pan and into the fire channel.

But perhaps the greatest example of “speaking grill” came from our own Wilson Drake, who our friends at Char-Griller selected to be the Voice of their campaign. In case you didn’t know, we’ve got a fantastic roster of in-house voice talent here at ECG, and the results… Well, they speak for themselves.

All told, Wilson spent nearly 17 non-consecutive hours in the booth. That’s a seriously hard-working man for some seriously hard-working grills!

Grade A (Grill) Marks

These videos not only feature some high-quality food porn, they also provide customers with a lot of useful information about the grills themselves! In other words, they do exactly what we – and our client – wanted them to do. And now, when we visit our friends and see their Char-Grillers, we get to point and tell them all about our adventures!