OUR SHIFT
I want to start with this. The shift that happens halfway through this spot is going to be imperative to nail if we want to stick the landing on this. It’s our rug pull moment, our reveal— it holds the soul of our spot in place.
I think we should discuss how to execute this moment in greater detail together— I could attempt to speak to it now, but in a way this switch is informed entirely by who we cast and the stories they are telling. We need to look at building an individual beat for each pair… But before we see the cast, I believe there are a couple things we can do to set us up for success on the day.
The first is that we need to hold off on revealing the true nature of the concept to our casted loved ones until the last possible moment, ideally until when we can shoot a fresh reaction. I think the way to do this is to work with the actors alone on their delivery of the stories— having control of the situation and their performance until we all feel that it’s been done right. That is when we bring in the loved ones in to shoot. They’re non-pro actors who we likely only have one clean shot at a genuine reaction with. This puts the ball back in our court to control that response. I will talk in our follow up call about how that shows up in the edit. I want to clarify that this doesn’t mean we won’t see the loved ones in our first half of the spot— merely that we are saving that singular emotional response until we feel we have the performance of the self talk covered properly.
The second point I believe makes this shift work is that the delivery can’t be overtly single toned. It can’t be too mean, it can’t be too pointed, it can’t be too melancholic. I think there will exist a line where the tonal delivery of the dialog itself acts as our hook for the first half of our spot. Are they reading it to someone else? Did someone else say that about them? Is this something that they have said? Which person are they speaking to? It’s a good thing to keep people guessing before the reveal, and it also saves the more loaded emotional moment for exactly when we want our shift to happen.
There will be more to discuss about the way we craft this, and a lot of it will come down to how we edit it, so let’s have a chat about it over our follow up call!