Dashing between Ypsilanti, Detroit, and Bloomfield Hills, three young U-M grads spent a hectic week in September shooting three ads for Mountain Dew.

Marty Stano, Debashis Mazumder, and Natalie Condon landed the plum commission, and $10,000, after designing an earlier, prize-winning ad promoting the soft drink. That spot was dialogue-driven, but parent company Pepsi Global commissioned the new ones with an international market in mind. “We needed scripts with high-energy action, adventure, and universal comedy,” explains Stano. The treatments green-lighted by Pepsi, says actor Evan Mann, “involve situations that would be serious if they weren’t handled comically”–an animal in a burning building, a protagonist in a hospital. Each version was shot three times, with Mountain Dew cans produced in the United Kingdom, Pakistan, and Dubai.

Members of Mann’s family appear briefly in the ads, as does Stano’s mother’s dog. So do uniformed firefighters and hospital workers from Ann Arbor and nearby cities. “The firefighters and their equipment brought the production value way up,” says Mazumder. Adds Stano, “We couldn’t have afforded real firefighter costumes.”