Video Production Case Study

B2B software is a difficult subject to make anyone care about. The value is real, but the story lives in workflows and containment rates, not exactly the stuff of a must-watch video. NiCE needed a campaign that could get a scrolling audience to stop, laugh, and still walk away understanding one specific argument: that automation only works when it’s built for customer service in the first place.

Comedy was the right answer, but comedy raises the stakes on everything else. A recognizable comic lead only pays off if the production around him holds up shot-for-shot. Miss on timing, continuity, or design, and a funny idea turns into an expensive one.

Our team at Avalanche Studios built the series around a premise simple enough to read in five seconds and rich enough to sustain three videos. Two versions of the same guy, one drowning in outdated tech, one living the effortless version of the same day:

• A concept that does the work for you. Present-day Jon versus Future Jon gave every video the same clear structure: the cringe and then the contrast. The joke never stops to make room for a sales pitch, because the punchline is the sales pitch.
• Casting through real relationships. Jon Heder and his brother Dan went through BYU film school alongside the core Avalanche Studios crew on this project—Jason Conforto directing, Bianca Cline as director of photography, and Jonas Sappington as production designer. That kind of trust takes decades to build, and it shows up in everything we shoot.
• Three videos instead of one. “Meet Future You,” “AI, AI My Captain,” and “Customer Service Legend” each carry a distinct message beat, giving NiCE a full campaign from a single production cycle rather than a single spot stretched across every channel. The series sits somewhere between commercials and branded content, and it works because it borrows from both.
• A locked script with room to play. Some of the funniest lines in the final cut were never written down. Jon improvised them, and the shoot was structured to catch them when he did.

The premise required both Jons on screen at the same time. Here’s how that was actually done, along with a few other things that never made it into the finished cut.

• We put both Jons in one frame. Dan Heder, Jon’s twin, stood in for the non-speaking side of every two-Jon scene. Our crew blocked and shot each one so the two versions could share a shot cleanly, no seams.
• Our production designer brought the source material with him. Jonas Sappington was the production designer behind Napoleon Dynamite. The sketches on the bulletin board here deliberately echo Napoleon’s notebook, a detail nobody had to notice for it to be worth doing.
• Our creative department chased continuity all day. The coffee spill was watered-down cola, and it faded between takes. They reapplied it over and over until the stain read exactly the way the scene needed it to.

None of this shows up in a list of deliverables. All of it is the difference between a video that works and one that almost does.

The three videos have earned 3.1 million combined views, and NiCE got a campaign it could keep building on rather than a single asset with a shelf life.

• The client wrote its own behind-the-scenes piece about the production, which you can read here: Behind the Bang: How Future You Got So Dynamite.

One shoot, three finished videos, a national brand’s flagship campaign, and a comedy premise that held up under an audience that doesn’t usually stop for software ads.