ACROSS THE UNITED STATES, November 20, 2006 - Writer/directors Andrew Christou and Charlie Tercek have returned to their glory days of high school football for "Jon & J.J. The Line of Scrimmage," an episodic branded entertainment series.  The show was created via Saatchi & Saatchi LA and airs Sunday nights during the halftime show of "Sunday Night Football" on NBC. 

So far, the series has taken the filmmakers and their crew to towns in California, Georgia, Ohio, and Texas, following two twenty-something high school football fans traveling across the US in their Toyota Tacoma.  Aspiring broadcasters, Jon Ray and J.J. Castillo are seeking out the absolute best high school football games. 

While Tercek and Christou have been traveling non-stop for months, the road trip began in July of 2006, when Saatchi asked the pair to develop branded entertainment concepts for its client, Toyota, which was preparing to market new editions of its pickup trucks, the Tundra and the Tacoma. 

The directors' extensive backgrounds had made them an obvious choice: Christou was as an art director at Wieden and Kennedy, where he was responsible for "Lil Penny," "The Iceman Cooketh," and other seminal Nike campaigns; for the past five years, he's directed commercials for Moxie Pictures.  Tercek was the creator of IBM's "Solutions for a Small Planet" campaign via O&M - at its time the largest campaign in advertising history; on the entertainment front, he has written half-hour comedy for network TV ("Sabrina the Teenage Witch") and written feature films for the Disney Channel.  Also an accomplished spot director, Tercek helms ads for LA-based Millennium Pictures.

"The client needed to do more than traditional advertising - TV spots, prints ads, and so on - to promote these trucks," said Tercek. "Toyota knows a lot about the typical pickup truck buyer and this person is heavily in sports - as a coach, a fan, a former player, or the parent of a current player. So early on, a decision was made: no matter what form this project took, it should focus on high school football."

Of the dozens of ideas Christou and Tercek generated for Toyota, one immediately struck a chord with the agency and client, getting a swift green light: an episodic TV series called "The Line of Scrimmage."  As directors, the challenge for Christou and Tercek was to make sure the show looked and felt like it was produced by a couple of guys with nothing more than a decent video camera and some editing software on their laptops. "The show had to look good, but not too slick," said Cindy Knight, marketing communications PR manager for Toyota. "It needed to feel loose and not at all rehearsed, in keeping with our whole marketing approach which is very grassroots, very much about building that emotional connection with our customers."

Finding the right cast was critical, and after auditioning hundreds of actors across the country, the directors found their stars at an open call in Austin, Texas.  Jon and J.J. (pictured above, l. to r., flanked by Christou and Tercek), both 22, had never studied acting or worked as an actor before. "Everyone we auditioned in L.A. was so sophisticated and polished," said Christou. "Jon and J.J. on other hand, are completely raw and unvarnished. They gave the show an immediate jolt of authenticity."

The production process presented some challenges.  After all, the high school football season is only 10 or 12 weeks long, so the directors and their crew would need to be editing and posting one episode while writing and filming the next.  A big touring bus provided the perfect answer, and now the entire production crew - including agency representatives, producers, editors and talent - travels to each location on this bus, which includes not just a kitchen and screening room, but state-of-the-art editing bay, designed and installed by editors Kevin Garcia and Devin Bousquet (of bicoastal Beast).  At the end of each shoot day, Christou and Tercek sit with the editors as they sift through the day's footage and get immediate feedback on what scenes work and which ones don't. "As it turns out, it's at the editing bay that the writing of each episode takes place," said Tercek.

By "writing," Tercek is referring to the bullet-point outlines he and Christou draft before each shoot day. These are based on time spent hanging around a given school, getting to know the coaches and players. "Early on in the series, it became clear that Jon and JJ are great on their feet, improvising, reacting in real-time to a given situation," said Christou, who added that the series is approached more like "Curb Your Enthusiasm" than a fully scripted show.  "We'll decide what we need each scene to communicate, and discuss this in depth with our performers," he explained, "then we shoot the hell out of it and construct the actual piece in post." 

For directors accustomed to shooting an approved, etched-in-stone script, this method is at once both liberating and intimidating.  "There's always the risk that a school just won't offer us up enough interesting material," said Christou. "So as you can imagine, we choose our games and schools very carefully."

Another advantage to working on a 14-episode project? "Each week we get a new opportunity to raise our game," Christou concluded. "When we roll into a new town on Monday morning, we have only a vague idea of what we'll shoot. All we know for sure is, it'll be even better than the stuff we shot the week before."

 

Client: Toyota
Series: "Jon & J.J. The Line of Scrimmage"
Series Launch: October 8, 2006 (most recent installment aired November 12)
Production Company: Moxie Pictures
Director(s): Andrew Christou, Charlie Tercek
EP(s): Lizzie Schwartz, Robert Fernandez
Head of Production: Roger Zorovich
Producer: Michele Robb
Agency: Saatchi & Saatchi LA
ECD: Harvey Marco
CD(s): Erich Funke
Copywriters: Charlie Tercek, Andrew Christou
Dir. of Broadcast Production: Damian Stevens
Senior Producer: Jennifer Vogtmann
Assistant Producer: Brandon Boerner
Editorial: Beast, bicoastal
Editor(s): Paul Norling, Kevin Garcia, Devin Bousquet
Titles: Brand New School, bicoastal
Music: Elias Arts, bicoastal
Shoot Location: Various, across America