Tell us about your organization. How big is your team? Where are you based? What is your organization’s specialty in the film and video space?
Ela Road is a Los Angeles-based creative studio founded by filmmaker and Creative Director Colin Costello and producer Lily Kim. We’re a boutique team by design, bringing together the right directors, producers, cinematographers, editors and artists for each project rather than relying on a traditional agency structure.
Our specialty is idea-driven film and branded entertainment — work that starts with a strong concept and is executed with the craft and ambition of filmmaking. Between us, we bring decades of experience spanning advertising, writing, directing and production, with a focus on creating memorable stories for brands across broadcast, digital and social.
Ela Road is built around a simple belief: great work doesn’t require a massive organization. It requires a great idea, the right collaborators and the willingness to make something people actually want to watch.
Why do you do what you do? Was there a transformative moment that solidified your career choice, your org’s success, or your commitment to storytelling?
Both Lily and I have spent our careers telling stories, and Ela Road grew out of a desire to get closer to the reason we fell in love with this business in the first place: creating something from nothing. An idea on a page becomes a set filled with people, performances, images and, eventually, a finished film that can make someone laugh, feel something or see the world a little differently.
For me, filmmaking was never one transformative moment as much as a series of them. I started in advertising, became a screenwriter and director, and eventually began teaching the next generation of filmmakers. Through all of it, the thing that has never changed is the thrill of storytelling and collaboration.
That’s also what Lily and I wanted Ela Road to represent. We wanted to create a place where the idea matters more than the size of the company, where talented people genuinely enjoy working together, and where we can take creative chances. When something like our Doritos work connects with an audience and is recognized by our peers, it reminds us why we keep doing it: somebody has to look at the blank page and say, “What if?”
Tell us about your Telly Award winning piece. What’s the story behind it?
Our Telly Award-winning work for Doritos was created as part of the brand’s “Go Bold” Super Bowl effort. We developed a campaign of three spots built around one simple idea: desire. Doritos isn’t a passive snack. When you want it, you really want it — and we wanted to have fun with just how far people might go to satisfy that craving.
Each spot took that idea in a completely different direction. In one, a woman literally battles a mysterious hand inside her couch for her Doritos. In another, a couple discovers that Doritos may be their best defense against a horde of hungry zombies. And in the third, a flag football team practices with a bag of Doritos as the ultimate motivation to keep their hunger for the win alive.
The comedy came from taking that desire for the brand and pushing it to absurd extremes. Whether you’re fighting your furniture, surviving the zombie apocalypse or chasing a championship, the Doritos are worth fighting for.
For Lily and me, that was the fun of the campaign. We weren’t simply putting the product into three stories. The product was the reason the stories happened. Doritos created the conflict, the motivation and ultimately the punchline. That gave us permission to go big, get weird and, appropriately enough, go bold.
Can you share a behind the scenes story or fun fact about the making of your piece?
One of our favorite behind-the-scenes moments came from the couch spot. The mysterious hand fighting our actress, Rachel Amanda Bryant, for her Doritos wasn’t an elaborate visual effect. We put the couch up on apple boxes, and our producer, Christine Sclafani, actually crawled underneath it, reached up through the cushions and wrestled Rachel for the bag. Sometimes the simplest practical effect is also the funniest — especially when your producer is under the couch fighting your talent for Doritos.
What was your biggest challenge during production and how did you solve it?
The biggest challenge was producing four spots on an incredibly tight timeline and on a zero budget. But anyone who works in advertising knows that’s often the nature of the business — you move fast, solve problems and somehow make the deadline.
What made it possible was the team around us. Our cinematographer, David Navarro, producer Christine Sclafani, editor Sarper Gokbulut and an incredible crew understood what we were trying to accomplish and embraced the pace. Each spot had its own world, its own comedic premise and its own production challenges, so maintaining the quality and energy of the campaign across all four was critical.
Ultimately, we pulled it off the same way most ambitious productions get made: surround yourself with talented people, trust them to do what they do best and keep moving forward together.
You won a Telly Award for this piece. Why is recognition important for you, your team or your work?
While we didn’t ultimately win the Doritos challenge, seeing our work featured on the Doritos website was a pretty great response. It meant that something we created independently had connected strongly enough with the brand to be showcased to its audience.
We’re also incredibly proud that the campaign went on to win Telly Awards and other advertising honors. But what makes that recognition especially meaningful is how we made the work. We had little to no budget, so we couldn’t solve problems by throwing money at them. We had to solve them with creativity, ingenuity and a team willing to find a way.
For Lily and me, that’s what we’re most proud of. The campaign showed what Ela Road can do when the resources may be limited, but the ideas and ambition aren’t.
Tell us what you’re up to! If there’s a new project, launch, or milestone you’d like us to celebrate with you, let us know, and we might share it with our community.
There’s a lot happening at Ela Road right now. On the advertising side, Lily and I continue to grow Ela Road as a creative studio and agency, developing campaigns and producing branded content for clients while staying true to the same philosophy behind our Doritos work: start with a strong idea and find the most creative way to bring it to life.
We’ve also continued expanding our narrative work. Our short film Swipe, a darkly comic thriller about the increasingly strange world of online dating, earned a Gold Telly Award (2026) and has helped demonstrate how naturally our advertising sensibility can cross over into entertainment.
Our biggest undertaking yet is The Long Dark Climb, an ambitious disaster thriller and proof of concept for a feature film. Inspired by the great disaster movies we grew up loving, the film follows a group of strangers trapped underground in a collapsing, flooding Chicago subway system. It stars Jonetta Kaiser, Eric Roberts, Tim Russ, Randy Couture, Nadège August and Sam Daly, with cinematography by John T. Connor and an original score by Alexander Bornstein.
