Engen / Wimpy - Love Song - (2013) :50 (South Africa)

Girl has milkshake. Boy is filling up the car. Girl looks at boy. Boy decides to bet it all on goofy dance moves set to George Harrison’s "Got My Mind Set On You". When I say goofy, I mean goofy.

“We were looking for the feel-good, underdog-comes-right feeling, the one you get when the star falls in love with the ordinary bloke in the romantic comedy and gives us all hope,” says Kevin. “The key element was the balance between the humour of the dance and the delicate moment when she finds herself charmed by his goofiness; balancing the two so that the dance never becomes too slapstick and the romantic moment never becomes too schmaltzy. The danger was that we placed too much emphasis on the humour of the dance and ignored the fact that this is first and foremost a love story, a zero-to-hero story.”

The spot features great performances by Jason Lume and Kimberley Marren. “It was important that he didn’t feel like a great dancer: I wanted him to look like a complete amateur doing some moves he saw on So You Think You Can Dance, but there needed to be a spontaneity and sense of abandon to him that transcends his lack of skill.”

In other words, he needed to be a lovable goof, and since she got a second straw for a milkshake, he was.

Title: Love Song
Client: Engen & Wimpy
Length: 1 x 50s / 1 x 30s
First flight date: 17 March 2013
Agency: Draftfcb Cape Town
Agency producer: Caz Friedman
Exec creative director: Mike Barnwell
Creative director: Aaron Harris
Art director: Scott Fowler
Copywriter: Chris de Villiers
Production company: Egg Films
City: Cape Town, South Africa
Director: Kevin Fitzgerald
DOP: Alard de Smidt
Production co-producer: Jon Ronbeck
Executive producer: Colin Howard
Post production company: BlackGinger
Editing company: Riot
Editor: Gordon Midgely
Music: Pulse Music