The commercial had everything necessary for comedy gold–a goat, a guy with a huge beard, a weird hoarding of snack food. But director Ben Callner knew it couldn’t succeed without its emotional apex: The goat must look into a once-stuffed pantry full of Doritos, which he and his owner used to share, and discover that the man has taken them all for himself. Then the goat must stare forward and scream. And the scream must be very… goaty. “If the goat doesn’t scream there, I don’t know if you really laugh,” says Callner, a 28-year-old freelance director in Atlanta. “We knew the scream was critical, and going into it, it was like, how are we going to get this goat to scream?”

It wasn’t easy. To film the shot, the crew stationed a second goat on a shelf behind the camera. The second goat, which is named Kudzu, had a lot to say about this: baa, baa. But Moose, the goat on camera, was just confused. He looked around. He walked away, then came back. The crew was silent and anxious. And then, finally: Baa. “After the first, we were like, ‘Oh my God, we got it,’” Callner says. “And then he did another, and it was, ‘Oh my god, that was even better!’ And then the third and we’re like, ‘OH MY GOD!!!’”

Still no scream, though. The goat only let out soft bleats, and that isn’t funny, though the camera caught the critical shot of a goat opening its mouth. Callner recorded two friends screaming to dub in for the goat, but neither were funny. And then he remembered a college buddy named Keith, who does a hilarious scream. So he called Keith, who recorded some noises on his iPhone and sent the file over. Callner patched them in. Perfection.

And now, months later, the spot is one of five finalists in Doritos’s seventh annual “Crash The Super Bowl” contest. Voters pick their favorite on Facebook, and two winners’ commercials will air during the game and earn other prizes. (One is picked by voters; the other is picked by Doritos.)

The making of Callner’s commercial isn’t just a wacky story about working with goats, though. As it came together, on a tight budget and with nothing more than a goat and a prayer, it became an important lesson in creativity: Limitations are helpful, if you know how to properly embrace them.





Contests like this can boost a career, and in fact, Callner has already experienced that. While in college, he became a perpetual intern—you know, the kid who just won’t go away—at the Atlanta production company Pogo Pictures. Eventually he struck up a friendship with its owner, Steve Colby, who became a mentor. Then in 2010, Callner made a commercial that won a Super Bowl commercial contest held by Georgia State Lottery. That’s when Colby decided Callner was ready for his own work: Pogo began representing Callner, suggesting him as a director for local commercials and then producing the projects.

“Since then, I’ve been able to call myself a freelance director, basically because I’ve been keeping my expenses incredibly low,” he says. That’s another way of saying he lives with his girlfriend in her parents’ basement, and still drives the 1998 Honda Accord he had in college. (Now with 216,000 miles!) “Otherwise I don’t know if I could do it–you’re living from job to job, and you’re trying to tell people, ‘This is why you want me to direct your spot.’”