Look

Often overlooked, I think bold choices about our visual aesthetic are pivotal to separating this film among a multitude of “performance based PSA’s” that have been done the same way to a point of redundancy. It’s simply a case of doing something different with the shooting format.

I say we shoot this open-gate large format. We can save costs by getting an older camera body and keeping this entirely locked off. We did this on the Twitter PSA and it immediately commanded attention— by using a premium format on a genre of film that usually underutilizes its own cinematic visual language, we instantly set ourselves apart. We subconsciously signal to an audience that this is worth their time. If we had all the money in the world, I would suggest a 35mm film-out print so that we delivered in 4 perf 35mm without the cost of shooting film in principal photography.

Throwing this out there for discussion… Have y’all considered this to potentially be in black and white? The most distilled form of graphic presentation that could keep our audience transfixed on our subjects?

Lastly, I want to keep most of this film to tight mediums and largely in single coverage. There’s no real need to establish the “space” in wides off the top as we want our entire focus to be on the subjects. This also allows us to have control in the edit in how we pace the performances and not be beholden to coverage that includes two actors until the moment they connect with each other.

Only after our shift and reveal of the full concept of the spot should we focus on integrating the pairs in frame.