Tesla has not done paid advertising, but that did not deter a group recent college graduates from making a video ad for the electric car company. The resulting ute-long ad titled “Modern Spaceship,” which the Los Angeles-based creators spent $1,500 to make in November. The creators recently started a 14 person production company called Everdream Pictures.
Everdream shot the Tesla spot in November at the home of a Tesla owner in Alamo, Calif. The $1,500 they spent was on hotel rooms, gas and food for the 15-person crew. They already had the equipment they needed.
The spot depicts a little boy who gets into the driver’s seat of the Tesla in his garage and imagines he’s piloting a spaceship. The ad got the Everdream Pictures crew a meeting with Musk this past January.
Tesla recently posted the ad on its Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts (a 15-second cut was for Instagram). They did so without paying the crew for use of the ad. Musk dis hinted at a future collaboration on Twitter. In response to someone who asked whether Tesla was planning on hiring the recent graduates, he wrote, “Yes, I’m confident that Tesla will do something with them.”
Everdream Co-CEOs James Khabushani, 25, and RJ Collins, 24, have a joint venture with talent manager and startup investor Troy Carter’s Atom Factory, and they work out of his office in Culver City, Calif.
They showed Carter the Tesla spot in their introductory meeting with him late last year.
Everdream currently has 14 employees and seed funding, according to Khabushani, and they’re set up to produce short- or long-form branded content. They’ve done video work for the pharmaceutical company Parexel and two music videos for the dubstep violinist Lindsey Stirling, a YouTube sensation and a Carter client. The latter is set to be released later this month.