A few months back I cut a Reebok spot for Venables, directed by Michael Lawrence. The challenge we encountered is a familiar one: balancing storytelling and aesthetics, keeping the concept clear without making it boring or predictable.
The film starts on a woman in her 60’s, powering through a Spartan race, then cuts to 10 years earlier. The woman, now in her 50s, is sprinting toward a wintry lake. This backward journey continues as we see the woman running through middle-age, college, adolescence, until we end on a swaddled baby on the first day of her life. We’ve seen running as a consistent source of joy and satisfaction, and understand that the woman’s late-life vitality wouldn’t be possible without the effort of her early years.
Of course, that concept would be lost unless it was perfectly clear that this is the story of a single woman, told in reverse, not a montage of various women jogging through various eras. The realities of production meant that different actors played the same character, which had the potential to create confusion, confusion that was deftly avoided by expert direction, casting, wardrobe, art direction, and performances. Michael and the agency captured a few potential match cuts for each transition backwards, so we could cut from a closeup of the 40-something face to a closeup of the 30-something, or cut from feet to feet, arms to arms, etc. These transitions worked every time, confidently guiding us backward through one woman’s life.
Initially we crafted an assembly in which every transition utilized a match cut. It was conceptually rock solid, but was falling flat. The story became boring and predictable, as every time we came to a closeup, you’d anticipate the next transition. And we were missing joy and personality, which were captured in looser scenes that weren’t so tightly-composed, like the look the young girl gives to the boy she leaves in the dust. These gave the character personality but disrupted the chain of match cuts.
So we played with a variety of assemblies, seeing how far we could stray from the match cut format before the story fell apart. We’d show edits to people who had read the script, and to people who hadn’t seen a thing, and quiz them on comprehension. We tried music that explicitly spelled out the concept, though nothing had the energy of the Nathaniel Rateliffe track that we ended up using. Eventually we found that if our initial transition, from the 60 to the 50-year-old, used a crystal clear match cut, we had the freedom to mix up the storytelling, to not worry about so explicit a connection every time, especially if we periodically reprised the transition. The story stayed strong without becoming pedantic, and kept the momentum building, so, hopefully, even though you may have an idea of where the story is going, you’re still engaged and excited throughout.
Click here to see the Reebok spot.
