Recreating an advertising film

The brief

Recreate an existing McDonald’s advertising film as faithfully as possible, as part of an audiovisual project during my BUT MMI degree. The model: the Big Mac BLT spot from January 2020, twenty seconds long. Neither a commission nor an original creation: an exercise in conformity.

Why it’s harder than it looks

Twenty seconds of advertising means a run of very short shots and tight cutting. Remaking a film shot by shot therefore means breaking the model down before filming anything: logging every shot with its framing, its axis and its duration, identifying every cut, then finding all of it again on set with the means available. Any gap from the original shows immediately, and that is what makes the exercise demanding.

My role

Script supervisor during the shoot, responsible for conformity to the model: shot order, positions, continuity from take to take. Then editor on Premiere Pro, assembling the sequences and recovering the pace of the original.

The team

Six people, including two actors, a sound supervisor, a boom operator and a camera operator. June 2024.

The result

Our version and the original are shown side by side. For this kind of exercise, it is the only proof that counts.