Chase Condrone
copywriter
The (Under)Cover Letter
The Problem: How does a young copywriter from the middle-of-nowhere Tennessee get noticed in a sea of applicants with more experience and more-developed portfolios?
The Answer: By creating a cover letter that’s too good to be ignored.
The Story: When I started applying for jobs after my first internship, I realized pretty quickly that my book alone wasn’t enough to make a splash. I needed something big to get creative directors talking. Then one evening while enjoying a much-needed drink with some friends, I came to a realization: agencies get inundated with “creative” cover letters and applications every day… and most of them end up in the trash. But, almost no one is going to throw out a good bottle of whiskey.
So, I turned to an old favorite: Jack Daniel’s. Being from Tennessee myself, I have a particular soft spot in my heart for Lynchburg’s legendary liquid. Jack and I go together like, well, Jack and most things. But there was one little problem: every one of the seven (yes, seven) fonts on the Jack Daniel’s label is proprietary.
But this, I decided, made my idea even better. I’d just have to work a little harder to pull it off. But if I could successfully recreate the label—and do it really well—no one else could come close. So I put my limited artistic ability to the test and began painstakingly reconstructing the label piece by piece, replacing nearly all of Jack’s copy with my own.
But still, I knew the bottle alone wouldn’t be enough. This was just the conversation starter. Then I had to take it somewhere. So I decided to replace the traditional bar code on the back with a QR code that would take them straight to my website—a slight nod to the digital savvy age and a direct funnel to get them looking at my actual work. I packaged the whole thing in an old crate with a bit of burlap and raffia for cushioning, and (not entirely legally) shipped it off to the delight and amazement of a couple CDs before landing in my first job.
The Lesson: It takes guts, innovation, and a little bit of bootlegging if you really want to make a splash.
“Look Ma, I Made a Movie!”
The summer before I started grad school, I found myself with nothing to do; so, I decided to star in a movie.
Well, it wasn't quite that simple, but you get the point. A friend's Facebook post led to a dorm-room audition video, and the next thing I knew, I was shooting18-hours-a-day, drinking whiskey in a coffin, and crashing a hearse.
There's nothing quite as scary as watching your face projected on a 40-foot movie screen. Add two theaters full of your family and friends watching you practice pick-up lines in a mirror and spoon with a ghost, and you've got the stuff of nightmares. But despite the initial shock, filming Opposite of Ernest and headlining the Knoxville Film Festival was some of the most fun I've ever had.
For now, my acting days are behind me, but it’s definitely cool seeing your face on a movie poster. Plus, the IMDb page always kills at parties.
“Six Thousandths of a League Under the Sea”
As a child, I was always fascinated with old adventure stories — Treasure Island, The Hobbit (my first book), The Count of Monte Cristo — but no one captured my imagination more than the inimitable Jules Verne. His adventures took my mind into the earth, around the world, and under the sea, ever longing to experience the wonders of the great unknown. There was just one problem: I was afraid of the ocean. And the dark. And heights. And lava… though that one’s probably justified. So, it wasn’t until my older, more reckless years that I finally visited one of Verne’s mystery worlds for myself, and the experience was better than any I could have imagined.
For my senior thesis on what I dubbed "adventure documentaries," I joined a ragtag group of marine biology students on a two-week SCUBA-diving excursion and research trip on the beautiful Caribbean island of Bonaire — the only island in the world surrounded entirely by a protected national coral reef. Besides diving 5 times a day into one of the most surreal, vibrant atmospheres I’ve ever had the pleasure of witnessing (as I’ve affectionately described it since: “it feels kinda like hiking on the surface of Mars”), I did some things I never thought possible: like standing on a shipwreck at 150 feet below sea level (about .006 nautical leagues), bumping into an 8-foot tarpon (a.k.a. The Silver King), putting my hand on a scorpionfish (yes, that’s a thing) and living to tell the tale, snorkeling through mangrove swamps, and photographing phosphorescing coral in the middle of the night.
To this day I'm not sure how I convinced them to take a student double-majoring in writing and theatre along on a cross-continental scientific expedition. But the lessons I learned in Bonaire will stick with me for the rest of my life. (Not the least of which is that a student with a GoPro, a can-do attitude, and a couple of books on filmmaking does not a documentarian make. But that’s a story for another time.)
“Oh No, Not Another Amateur Photographer!”
Born and raised in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains, I've always had a passion for the great outdoors. And with a backyard this beautiful, there's almost nothing better than grabbing a camera and venturing out to see what you can find. From handfuls of frog eggs to nesting herons and Great Horned Owls, I’ve seen (or touched) it all.
I've spent countless hours nestled in the grass or perched on a rock in Cade's Cove waiting for some elusive creature to waltz by. But often the most amazing moments — like the golden sunrise I basked in early one January morning as the whole field seemed to come alive or the smoke wafting from the curing room at Benton's Bacon as a worker reverently opened its doors — don’t contain any wildlife at all. (Much to the consternation of my Wildlife Photography professor when I won the annual photo contest with a picture of an empty field.)