TELL REAL STORIES — PRODUCING AN AUTHENTIC TOUR DE FEMMES TV SPOT
Last Summer, I produced a TV commercial that aired internationally during the Tour de Femmes and Tour de France. Initially written as a fictional storyline designed to illustrate the cross-generational progress in women’s cycling that the return of the Tour de Femmes represented, the script contained an authentic backstory born out of a run-in meeting in Girona, Spain.
The Hammerhead commercial features a cyclist climbing up a renowned Spanish climb guided by the Karoo 2. We hear the narrator’s voice — which we presume to be the mother of the cyclist — hoping for a future in which her daughter can “stand on her shoulders” and share the same experience of climbing mountains, both literally and figuratively, as a woman in the sport. In a moment of reflection, the cyclist summits the mountain and pulls out an old photograph of her mother racing a bike.
The cyclist is Keira McVitty and the image is an actual photograph of her mother racing bikes back in the day. Not only did both Keira’s mother and father race bikes, but she comes from 4 generations of bike racers. Inspired by her mother to pursue the sport, her story is the embodiment of the cross-generational progress that women continue to fight for in the sport of cycling and beyond, and was completely unknown to me when I wrote the script for this spot.
As I began planning this production, I asked Hammerhead’s Social Media Coordinator and Community Manager, Mia, if she knew any riders in the Pyrenees region, a location I had targeted for the shoot due to its recognizable, world-renowned climbs. Mia recalled randomly meeting a cyclist months earlier on some steps outside of a Girona cafe and passed her contact along to me. After an initial call with Keira McVitty, she and I discovered that her life story perfectly aligned with one of the concepts I had developed for the script. Even her mother’s voice was eerily similar to the voice actor I had hired to temp in the audio cut. It was a chilling moment. I had first conceptualized the fictional script as a way of personifying the monumental milestone that the Tour de Femmes represented — but here on the phone before me was the living, breathing hero of the story. We both agreed — we had to make it happen.
I teamed up with Nick Nelson from BangBang Studios and the two of us flew to Spain to shoot the spot. As we arrived, a big Summer storm rolled into the region and ruined any chance of us getting the beautiful golden hour light we were after at the location we had chosen. We were forced to pivot at the last minute to a region closer to Girona and, in one last stroke of serendipitous fortune, found the perfect climb aptly named “Mare de Déu del Mont” – Catalan for “Mother of God of the Mountain.”
TAKEAWAY
Obviously, you can’t plan for serendipity, but you can tell real stories. And I’ve found that the more real the story, the more serendipity tends to work itself into the production.
Real stories are derived from universal truths. They are born out of the collective unconscious of all of humanity across time. They aren’t grounded in pop culture, politics, or trends. They transcend time and culture. Real stories are true forever in all places.
In some sense, this story was about culture; it had implicit references to the Tour de Femmes and hit on culturally relevant topics of progression in women’s sports. But the core idea was anchored in something much deeper; a parent’s longing for a better world for their child. This is a story that has been and always will be, cross-culturally real.
While the serendipity that brought Keira McVitty into this commercial contributed to the authenticity of the piece, I believe this would have come across as a true and authentic story regardless. In the eternal quest for brands to remain authentic within their communities, real stories are the backbone to which all bodies of work should be rooted.
