The spot takes place on Halloween night, when a trio of friends comes to the dreadful realisation that they’re running low on candy. Keke Palmer’s character explains how one family vanished on Halloween after the same thing happened to them, as she rushes to order more on Uber Eats - but at that moment, the electricity goes out. What ensues is classic horror as the friends nervously split up, each pursued by a malevolent masked figure in the shadows that will teach them never to run out of candy again.
Philosophie
This Halloween, Uber Eats has joined forces with Keke Palmer and Great Guns USA to deliver a creepy campaign like no other. Embedded with $1 million worth of discount codes, ‘Don’t Run Out’ was directed by Great Guns USA’s Dan Trachtenberg - a known talent in the genre, having helmed such Hollywood thrillers as ‘10 Cloverfield Lane’ and ‘Prey’. Agency Kamp Grizzly approached Great Guns USA with the brief for a short, scary movie about running out of candy on Halloween - with $1 million worth of discount codes hidden inside. MD and EP on the project, Oliver Fuselier selected director Dan Trachtenberg as the perfect choice to craft the frightening film. Taking up the gauntlet, Dan now faced the challenge of condensing suspenseful horror - by definition requiring build up over time - into a mere few minutes. Dan tackled this by blending quick, shocking moments of action with slow, tension-building scenes, helped by economical editing from David Trachtenberg. A conversation between author and audience, the spot also required an awareness of viewer expectation due to pre-established genre awareness. Drawing from his previous experience working on a range of thrillers, Dan utilised shot construction and sequence design to deliver jolts or build tension in classic horror ways, mathematically crafting a campaign fit for the genre. One scene which required particular creative problem solving was when the pumpkin-masked menace smashes in Tyler Ritter’s (‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D’) face. Dan’s vision was for it to cause a gush of what initially looks like blood, until it nears Tyler’s glasses on the ground and comes into focus, revealing it to be red candy. On location, the crew realised that it would be physically impossible to craft the shot due to the camera’s position and its distance from the glasses. Thankfully, DP Jeff Cutter and PD Noel McCarthy found a way, constructing faux flooring as a ramp to place the glasses on in shallow focus, using the old school movie magic technique of forced perspective to save the shot.