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"      Boring Super Bowl, yes, but was Atlanta mysteriously gifted the greatest local Super Bowl commercial of all-time last night as a gift from God after a week of snowy Hell? Let&amp;#039;s break it down like a football game, because we sadly did not get one of those last night. Here&amp;#039;s the two-minute Seven Samurai remake also known as the Super Bowl spot for Savannah-based personal injury attorney Jamie Casino (real name [actually, who knows, but who really wants to make that phone call?]). Inigo Montoya-style revenge fantasy? Yes. Flashback that alludes to the fact that this personal injury lawyer might have been a magician by trade very recently, or maybe still is? Yes. Shaking hands over a stack of cash? You bet. A moving newspaper emblazoned onto a headstone (???) using the &amp;quot;charcoal&amp;quot; function in Adobe After Effects? Si, se\u00F1or. What appears to be a shot-for-shot reenactment, at some points, of Seal&amp;#039;s music video from &amp;quot;Kiss from a Rose&amp;quot;? Inexplicably, yes. An on-fire sledgehammer dragged across mud that, when panned out, reveals the name of a lawfirm? Check. Discarded AC/DC song as background music, performed by a desperate Godsmack? Of course. A comments section that seems to be genuinely moved by all of this? Yes sir. It&amp;#039;s basically perfect. Best local Super Bowl commercial of all-time, right?  Still, we needed to get to the bottom of how this thing got made. So we called the commercial&amp;#039;s editor and visual effects guy, Stephen Withers, to talk about how this was put together. Esquire.com: How did you get involved? Stephen Withers: My company supervises post-production. I did the editing and the digital effects work on it. ESQ: Wait, so how much of that sledgehammer fire is actually fire? SW: It&amp;#039;s a little bit of a mix. There was a lot of practical fire on set, but Jamie definitely wanted a lot more fire. And there was a limit to what the technical guys could do. The fire was a big thing for him. We added a little bit in post. ESQ: So how was he? SW: He was definitely a fun client to work with. He had a pretty solid idea of what he wanted. He used his storyboards to set up the edits the way he wanted. It was really like an &amp;#039;80s action movie, Terminator kind of feel when he brought it in, and he wanted to get away from that. Plus, we had to reconcile this gunslinger image from his previous ads with this family man idea. ESQ: So it was largely his idea? SW: He had come up with the idea over Christmas and recruited a company called E3 Media to help put it together. So we started pretty late in the game. The whole thing was really last minute. The storyboard he had was pretty detailed, and he didn&amp;#039;t have a script, so they shot from his drawings. It was all in his head. ESQ: So when you first saw it, what was your reaction? SW: I didn&amp;#039;t quite know what to think. I knew about the backstory -- the police chief in Savannah, all of that. Once I started reading about it, it was something I actually started really caring about. It was really stressful with the schedule we&amp;#039;d laid out. We started right after Christmas. They got me on a week before they started shooting. ESQ: When did you know the commercial went nuts on the Internet? SW: My brother sent me a text saying it was on Deadspin. That was the moment where I was like, &amp;quot;Oh.&amp;quot; ESQ: How has your day been? Reaction has been crazy. Some people want it to be made into a movie. SW: I knew it would definitely get a lot of attention locally, especially for people familiar with his work. He&amp;#039;d built up this gunslinger image from these previous commercials.  ESQ: Oh, is that what that was? In the first couple of seconds, you see him tossing stuff. I thought he was a magician. SW: No, no. [Laughing.] A lot of people locally know him from those commercials. That was the biggest thing, reconciling his gunslinger image with the rest of this message. He&amp;#039;s pretty well known for that. As an editor, it was a great challenge. Plus, I heard they might be looking to make it into a pilot. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a27179/best-local-super-bowl-ad/>