Since joining Tongal in late 2011, Matt Sweeney has spent a bunch of time at the top of the Ideation Leaderboards and has made some seriously funny videos. Whether he's spoofing a Hollywood classic or drawing on his (sometimes embarrassing, oftentimes hilarious) personal experiences, Sweeney is taking Tongaling to the next level. Below he waxes poetic about where great ideas come from . . . And what they can lead to.
Wanna hear what happened at the first college party he ever went to? (Hint: #whitemarksfail) Read on!
Ingrid V.: How did you first get involved with Tongal?
Matt Sweeney: A friend of mine turned me on to it. I liked the fact that the production process was broken down into phases. A lot of the other video contest sites don't offer much feedback until the contest is over. I like knowing I'm headed in a direction the brand wants. And I love the idea round because it lets folks without production backgrounds participate.
IV: You're a jack-of-all-trades here at Tongal. Did you set out to be involved in all phases of Tongal Projects?
MS: I had always planned to enter a pitch but I didn't have a commercial reel. I was a news editor so my reel was all ribbon cuttings and house fires.
For a while, I just submitted ideas. Then I remembered my friend Zach Lee was a great filmmaker and he had a great reel. I convinced him to team up and we made a spot for Lego's first Hero Factory project. I wrote, he edited and we both directed it.
IV: You've come up with a TON of winning Ideas. In your opinion, what makes a good idea?
MS: I think the absolute quickest way to connect with people is to make them laugh. So unless the brief asks otherwise, I always try to make it funny. It's an easy way to make an ad memorable. The day after the Super Bowl, everyone likes to debate which commercial was the funniest. Those are the ones that stand out.
IV: Where do you get your inspiration? What's your creative process like?
MS: The easiest way is to riff off of things that have happened to me in real life. My idea for the Secret Outlast competition was loosely based on the first party I ever went to in college.
I was a freshman and somewhat new to doing my own laundry. I guess I somehow bleached my shirt because I walked into a room lousy with black lights and was immediately covered in glowing splotches. It looked...unfortunate. So that idea pretty much wrote itself.
When I can't just crib from my own life, I find it's best to work on ideas in stages. I'll grab a notepad and jot down whatever initial impressions of the brief I have. Then I'll go do something else for a few hours and let it marinate in my subconscious. When I come back to my notepad, some decent ideas have usually bubbled to the surface.
IV: What's your favorite Idea you ever submitted?
MS: My absolute favorite didn't get picked. It was for the National Pork Board competition. They were changing the name of pork cuts to sound more like steak and they wanted an ad about it. I proposed a spoof of the scene in Chinatown where Jack Nicholson interrogates Faye Dunaway:
Forget about it, Jake. It's PorkTown!Spoof of famous "Sister! Daughter!" scene from Chinatown. Guy gets slapped as he alternates between saying "Porterhouse!" and "Loin Chop!"
It's kind of out there, so I can understand why it didn't get picked.
My favorite idea that actually won was the one I submitted for the first Lego Hero Factory project. That's because it led to my first Tongal pitch and video. I'm really happy with the way that video turned out. I also really enjoyed Jason Ragosta's commercial, which was based on the same idea. He took the video in a number of cool directions that I hadn't anticipated. That's the neat thing about Tongal - you can take the same idea and get two very different videos.
IV: Any advice for other Tongalers who want to become Idea geniuses like you?
MS: You can submit up to five ideas, so submit five ideas. It's not the video stage. Submitting five ideas isn’t that much more work than submitting one.
After you read a brief, there's going to be a bunch of ideas that seem very obvious to you. Skip those. If they're obvious to you, it's a pretty good bet they jumped out at everyone else, too. Keep going until you're a little bit off the beaten path. Not too far though, or you'll lose everybody.
IV: How do you decide which projects to submit to on Tongal?
MS: For the idea rounds, I submit to pretty much all of them. I think it's like any skill - you get better the more you practice. Plus it's kind of fun.
For videos and pitches, I only submit when I think I have an execution no one else has thought of. There's a lot of different ways to interpret an idea and I get excited when I can put a unique spin on it.
IV: What's your filmmaking background?
MS: I've been writing and shooting skits and shorts ever since I was little. I went to school for finance but when I graduated I got a job as a news video editor. After a few years of saving up, I packed whatever I could fit in my Honda and drove out here to Los Angeles. Now I work in post production at a company that films stand-up comedy. I shoot shorts and specs for Tongal whenever I have free time.
IV: What's next for you, on Tongal or otherwise?
MS: I definitely want to keep shooting stuff for Tongal. I'd like to expand the scope of my shoots: bigger crews, fancier locations and maybe renting a Blackmagic or a C300.
I'd also really like to collaborate more with other filmmakers (maybe other Tongal folks?). I just shot something for Sandisk with another Tongaler, Brian Harvath, and it was such a blast to make.
