Fireflies Patagonia
Made for Specialized, released through That Triathlon Life

The problem

We came into this one backwards. The trip was already over. A terabyte of footage and a handful of interviews had been shot across the Andes, and the job was to find the film hiding inside it. No script, no shot list, no second chance to grab a missing moment. Just everything that existed, and the question of what story it could tell.

Most video works forward: plan, shoot, edit. This was the reverse. We had to watch all of it, find the thread, and build a twelve-minute film using only what was already in the can, saying things that were never said on camera and connecting ideas the riders never directly discussed.

What we did

We found the story first, then made everything serve it. It was hiding in the quiet moments. One rider admitted he'd spent twenty years racing for himself, and only now understood what it meant to ride for someone else. We built the film around that turn.

The ride raises money through The Blood Fund for kids with cancer, but the footage was mostly bikes and mountains. To land the reason behind the ride, we sourced additional imagery from Fireflies to bring the human weight of cancer into the film, the part the trip cameras were never going to capture.

Then the ending. A film like this lives or dies on how it carries you out, so we went after Hoppípolla by Sigur Rós. That meant tracking down the band's management and earning permission for a nonprofit use, which we did. The right song, cleared the right way, credited properly.

The target was twelve minutes, in a format where most viewers drop off in the first two. We built it to hold them the whole way.

The result

It held them. The film pulled thousands of views and hundreds of shares, but the comments are the real result. Viewers watched a twelve-minute film and asked for more. People who'd lost family to cancer wrote to say it captured something true. For a short film on the internet, keeping people to the end and leaving them moved is the whole job.

What viewers said:

"I would pay good money to watch a full length version of that."
— @charleselliott3314

"Been a while since I've shed tears at a YouTube video. One of my favorites of all time."
— @BrandonBruman

"As someone who lost their brother to cancer in January, this is truly incredible and so important."
— @AussieAmz

Want a film people actually finish?

mark@flipturncreative.com