Falling in love with Wawa Hoagiefest has never been easier

If you've ever been to the mid-Atlantic coastal region during the summer you've probably had a hard time not noticing Wawa Hoagiefest. It's sprawled across every other billboard, it's being talked about in college dorm rooms, and it's written in the eyes of the people you love. There's a good reason for all this hubbub and that's because Wawa undeniably has the best made-to-order food among any other gas station/convenient store chain. And the best part is, every summer Wawa slings tons of their classic hoagies for super low prices. So, yeah, Hoagiefest is kind of a thing.

When we were approached to work with Wawa on this project they had a fairly sussed-out game plan for a video that would feature a girl who just wanted to fall in love with a custom hoagie. Leading up to production we created storyboards, shotslists, and an animatic which all helped map out the exact beats of the commercial.

One of the biggest challenges we had to face when producing this commercial was the limited time that we would have available to us to film in a Wawa store. Because of this, we filmed overnight at a brand new Wawa location that was set to open its doors the next morning. We also leaned on our robust pre-production that was done in advance. This ensured that we knew exactly how we would execute each of the shots in this commercial and that we would be fully wrapped with our filming before the store was set to open.

On our production day the Big River team managed a production crew of 10 people as well as 2 main talent and multiple background talent. We worked through the night to light, shoot, and tear down our entire production in a short timeframe and made sure that the location was ready for it's grand opening.