Duct Tape Doritos - Interview with Joe Herbert

I was able to reach out to the creator of the Doritos Duct Tape commercial, Joe Herbert. His commercial, Duct Tape Doritos, is currently one of the top five finalists in Doritos "Crash the Super Bowl" promotion. I didn't want to go into too much detail since he is quite busy with other obligations as a result his recent success. However, he did take the time to answer five questions for me. Feel free to read below.

1. What made you decide to this? We had just finished our first short film, and were looking for a second project a good friend (and co-producer) heard about the contest Doritos was having, where the winning commercial would be aired during the Super Bowl. The timing was perfect, because we love football, super bowl commercials, and Doritos.

2. What is your background in writing script? It is our dream to one day make a movie, and over the last three years we began reading and learning about every aspect of film making, including script writing. Prior to the Doritos commercial we had written two scripts, a feature and a short film script, and had started various others.

3. How did you come up with this particular skit? The Duct Tape commercial idea came from similar real life experiences and the lengths you must go to protect your food when you live with roommates, especially in college when actually having food is such a commodity. I personally purchased and installed a locking door knob for my bedroom where next to the bed I kept my full sized refrigerator. In addition... who among us has not at one point wished they could duct tape someone to a door/wall.

4. How much experience do you need to make a commercial of this quality? You don't need a lot of experience to make a quality commercial, but that does not mean that anyone could do it either. What you need first and foremost, is a creative imagination and the ability to begin with an idea that has high quality potential if done right. Then we realized is that you don't have to do it alone. The bigger budget film productions have a large cast of people all with specialized talents. We sought out local filmmakers in the community looking for volunteers to help us. The ability to sell your idea, as well as yourself, is helpful. If you have a great script and the leadership a good director has, that makes it easy to get other people excited about being a part of it. We started by obtaining the talents of Jim Timperman (director of photography) and John Blankenship (Sound) and everything else fell into place. We ended up with a total of 20 people between cast and crew. We also spent countless hours in preproduction planning every shot, so that when the day of shooting came around, we could easily manage the combined efforts of 20 people successfully.

5. Would you change anything about the commercial if you had to do it over again? Because of the amount of time we spent researching the idea, location scouting, planning out the shots, and organizing cast and crew, we were very well prepared for anything, and we extremely happy with how everything came together. You could enter as many as 10 commercials in the contest, and we submitted two. Both made the top 8 in the contest with over 1,000 entries... and if we had it to do all over again, the only thing we might have changed is maybe doing 10 commercials.. fortunately for the other contestants we only did the two.

Make sure to vote for Doritos Duct Tape at www.crashthesuperbowl.com.

I hope his commercial is aired during Super Bowl XLI and wish Joe all the success in the world for future endeavors.