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My name’s John A C Allen and I’m going to tell you about my adventures directing two entries for the Doritos King of Ads competition: a big’un and a little’un.

The ads came about when someone mentioned the scheme at a drunken evening. Four of us decided to have a crack at it: Dave Jewell, Andy Leckonby, John Raine and myself. There was no budget whatsoever so the plan was to shoot over a weekend using gear and props sourced between us.

Dave wrote and produced ‘Secret Agent’, the big’un. We went for a mini epic feel and pastiched a certain multi million dollar espionage franchise. First and only choice for the lead role was the mighty James Harris and for the girl I brought in Eva Quinn, an actress I was keen to work with. Both jumped at the chance to glam up and run round with guns. John Raine got to put a see through laundry basket over his head as the villain!

As director he biggest problem facing me was to create a feeling of massive scale with no money and about six extras. We hunted high and low for the right locations and eventually shot in the former Blyth town hall and in the lower levels of Newcastle’s fantastic Discovery Museum, where we installed an elaborate bomb built from Pringles tubes and computer spares by Elliott Sinclair.

My little ad, ‘Men Who Stare At Doritos’, was tagged onto the end of the main shoot. I take all responsibility for this one. I had the idea of an ad campaign based on telekinesis and other strange phenomena. When I rang actor Joe Teague to invite him onboard he just heard the title and said ‘I’m in’! Friends of mine over at 4^th Dimension Entertainment had just acquired an amazing new camera and this was the chance to try it out (at least, that’s how I tempted them onboard), prime lenses and all. Thanks to Phil Hunton for the loan of his photography studio. Altogether ‘MWSAD’took all of an hour to shoot. The hardest bit was getting the Dorito to move by the power of the mind…

Needless to say by the end of the weekend none of us wanted to see another Dorito!

‘Men Who Stare at Doritos’ made it to the Top 100 beating off thousands of entries. ‘Secret Agent’ did even better and narrowly missed out on the Top 15!

Not bad for a weekend’s work! 

SECRET AGENT     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7U12PW34Pg

MWSAD               http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P78MPUXHt7o