Sandwich in a Lunchbox: socially-distant ad production

Editor’s note: Sandwich is a Los Angeles–based creative agency and Slack customer that specializes in video storytelling. The firm recently created a new Slack ad, which you can view below. Its founder wrote this blog post and created the accompanying behind-the-scenes video (also below) to share how his team kept their work moving during Covid-19.

It was the day before Sandwich decided to close our offices for Covid-19 when we had the alarming realization that we wouldn’t be assembling crews anytime soon, and we wouldn’t be shooting the projects we’d lined up—at least not by any traditional means.

But what we figured we could do is tell the story of how we continued to work as a team using our favorite collaboration tool: Slack. And we could tell the story in a completely new way, working from home (using Slack) to make the video itself (for Slack).

So we put together a teaser and sent it to Slack CEO and co-founder Stewart Butterfield directly. He gave us the go-ahead, and we spent the next days developing a whole new set of methods for producing a commercial using real equipment, entirely from the homes of our team, with our families around and everything.

Sandwich had worked with Slack in 2014 to help introduce the channel-based messaging platform to teams like ours, and we used a similar style back then to tell the story, with ourselves as the characters. But this time, under these circumstances, was even more special, because we found along the way that Slack isn’t just how we work together; it’s where our team stays connected, and where we can feel less isolated during these times when it’s so easy to lose connection.

And as it turns out, the methods we came up with to make this video worked, and it’s something we’ll use for other clients now too. We even named it: Lunchbox by Sandwich, a whole new way for us to shoot projects and make them just as great as ever. Gotta keep working until we can get our crews back together safely.

Here’s the Slack ad

Here’s a peek behind the scenes