The Art of Parallel Production
Popchips was relaunching its packaging around a new ingredient story, swapping industrial seed oils for avocado oil, and wanted a summer campaign that did more than announce the change. It needed to feel authentic to a Gen Z audience while introducing the brand’s new platform: Always Real. Never Fried. Never Overproduced.
Popchips and its agency, SRW, brought in Thunderlab to produce the entire campaign across CTV, lifestyle photography, product photography, and stop-motion. The challenge was not just creating a lot of content. It was figuring out how to create it efficiently without sacrificing the craft of any individual format.
The brief called for a robust, multi-format campaign designed to work everywhere the brand showed up:
Three CTV cutdowns (:30, :15, :06), each in 9:16 and 16:9
Ten edited lifestyle images
Ten edited product images
Stop-motion product content
An additional unedited image gallery
One year of usage across CTV, Meta, TikTok, and digital retailer placements
From kickoff to cameras rolling, we had less than three weeks to lock locations, cast and negotiate talent, build our crews, source props and wardrobe, and develop two distinct production plans.
But the bigger challenge came on shoot day.
We needed to run a CTV production and a lifestyle photography production simultaneously, in the same house, with each team maintaining its own lighting, compositions, shot list, and creative objectives.
Rather than treating photography as an extension of the video shoot, we built two dedicated productions designed to work in parallel.
The Challenge:
What We Uncovered
Looking at the creative ambition, timeline, and budget together, we knew the production needed to be designed differently from the start.
Parallel Capacity
Photo and video needed the space and resources to deliver against their own creative standards, without one becoming secondary to the other.
Efficiency by Design
Every crew member, setup, and production decision needed to earn its place while still delivering national campaign-level craft.
Adaptability
Working across one location with two active crews required constant coordination and quick decision-making to keep both productions moving.
Craft Across Formats
Whether it was a :30 CTV spot, a lifestyle image, or a stop-motion asset, every deliverable needed to feel part of the same Popchips world.
Our Solution: Two Productions, One Day
1. Pre-Production at Speed
With less than three weeks on the clock, thoughtful pre-production was essential.
We compressed casting, location scouting, wardrobe, props, and two parallel shot plans into the same window so both crews could move independently once cameras rolled.
Our search for a believable Gen Z apartment led us to a 1930s Tudor in Chicago. The real, lived-in home gave us exposed brick, texture, character, and multiple distinct environments within one location. It created an authenticity that would have been difficult and significantly more expensive to recreate on a stage.
2. Two Crews. One House. One Day.
Rather than having photo and video trade setups throughout the day, we built two dedicated teams and ran them simultaneously.
One crew focused entirely on the CTV campaign while the other captured lifestyle photography, each with its own lighting approach, creative objectives, and shooting rhythm.
That meant continuously coordinating talent, rooms, lighting, equipment, and schedules to keep both teams moving without compromising either side of the production.
The result was two full productions captured within a single shoot day, without forcing photography to inherit the video setup or slowing video down to accommodate stills.
3. The Right Tools, On Purpose
Working efficiently does not mean compromising on the tools that make a difference.
For the CTV campaign, we chose the Alexa 35 cinema camera to give the spots the image quality and polish the national launch deserved.
Photography took a deliberately different approach. Lifestyle images leaned into on-camera flash for an immediate, point-and-shoot honesty, while product photography used large, natural-feeling light sources to keep the packaging clean, bright, and tactile.
Different techniques. One cohesive visual world.
Always Real – :30 Connected TV
Always Real – :06 Connected TV
Results & Impact
Speed Without Compromise
From CTV rounds and photography selects to product retouching and stop-motion, every milestone landed within the compressed May schedule.
The final CTV campaign remained closely aligned with the original storyboards, while the parallel production model allowed us to capture an extensive lifestyle library within the same shoot day.
One location. One day. Two dedicated productions.
A Content System, Not Just a Campaign
Popchips walked away with more than a handful of campaign assets.
The production created a flexible content library that included three CTV cutdowns across multiple aspect ratios, ten lifestyle images, ten product images, stop-motion content, and an additional gallery of photography for future use.
The value of that library continued beyond the original campaign. Popchips later returned to license several of the lifestyle images for retail print mailers, extending the work into placements that were not part of the original scope.
The Thunderlab Difference
Parallel production only works when efficiency is built into the production from the beginning.
For Popchips, that meant detailed pre-production, two dedicated crews, a location that could support multiple environments, and constant coordination throughout the day. It also meant knowing where to stay lean and where investing in craft would make a meaningful difference on screen.
We do not look at efficiency as doing less. We look at it as designing the production smarter.
That is how one shoot day became two complete campaigns.