Have a peep inside this time capsule…

I found a little gem the other day.  A brief had come in for an ad to celebrate the 100-year anniversary of the cinema. The budget was decidedly Indie.

Myself and art director partner, John Trainor, had about a week to write something and not much longer to shoot it.

Sometimes restrictions work in your favour.  There wasn’t time for endless navel gazing – we had to make our decisions fast. Thankfully, so did our client.

We needed big screen presence and we needed to make a miniscule budget look like a million dollars. We needed stars. And we needed them for free.

I enlisted the help of producer friend, Mark Stothert, and DP, Larry Smith (who’d worked with Stanley Kubrick amongst others). The idea was to ask some of the most famous faces we could find what they loved about going to the cinema.

Hopefully we’d discover that we were all united by similar feelings.

Oh and some bright spark came up with the idea of finding someone 100 years old to top and tail the film – the lovely lady we found was 102.

Mark and Larry put together a roving camera crew, ready to head out pretty much anywhere at a moment’s notice.

We then set out to see whether the 6 degrees of separation theory (the idea that any two people in the world are six or fewer social connections away from each other) was actually true.

It was astonishing who we got to and how quickly.

If you’re wondering how we achieved that lovely grainy look? It was all shot on film; you could hardly celebrate 100 years of cinema on video...

Years later, as I look at the footage, I’m stunned by the calibre of people we found. Have a look. See if you can name them all?