An invitation to a criterium in a car park
A race invitation is usually a poster. A poster gives you a date; a video tells you what it will feel like to be there.
Criterium in the car park: the invitation
The brief
A short invitation for a continental team to a criterium raced in the underground car park of a Prague shopping center. The goal: get riders there who have never heard of the course.
What was at stake
A criterium in a car park is an experience a date and a map can't explain. Either the invitation conveys what it's like to ride between concrete pillars, or the field doesn't fill.
The constraint
Thirteen seconds. That running time has no room for introducing the team, the history of the race or the sponsors. It has room for one sentence and one place. Everything else has to give way.
How it was shot and cut
We filmed on the course itself, in the car park and the shopping-center concourse, and let the rider deliver one continuous thought to camera.
The location is the main character
Pillars, painted parking bays, hard light. You get this nowhere else: shot on a road, the same invitation would work for any race at all.
One sentence, cut into a rhythm
The line runs across several shots, two or three words at a time. The viewer reads while the picture changes, so thirteen seconds carry as much as half a minute of talking.
It ends on an invitation instead of a logo
The last shot is the rider saying "see you there." Closing on a graphic full of logos would mean ending on information instead of on a relationship.
Frames from the film
Click any frame to open it full screen.
The team has an invitation a rider can share from his own account, which in thirteen seconds shows what a poster can't: where the race runs and why it's worth turning up.
CreditsConcept, camera and edit: Kirill · Team: L27