A vintage Coca-Cola advertisement comes alive in this short film where a Midwestern town in the 1940s experiences the arrival of a very special train.
If you’re familiar with our work, this short film won’t surprise you.
In 2011, we had the opportunity to conceive, write, and produce this piece with two purposes in mind: bring to life a classic Coca-Cola advertisement and capitalize on this famous train that calls Fort Wayne home.
If done well, the piece would promote the non-profit organization that owns, maintains, and operates the train, and help them spread the magic of the train to folks who may not necessarily sit and watch a train video or even know that a train like this even exists. And if Coke or another company wants to utilize the magic of locomotive no. 765 in some sort of corporate sponsorship, even better, because we think Travel Refreshed is a great blueprint.
In film-land, we call this a speculative or “spec” project, which typically means you have all these fun ideas but there’s no money in it (typical, right?). But we believed in the idea enough to borrow the train, a historic setting, invite 20-30 extras in great period clothes, hire a few film students, and here we are. Travel Refreshed, for those wondering, was short mostly on the RED One, with second unit photography on the Canon 7D and 1DC shooting in 4k.
You may ask, why did it take so long to finish? Well, spec projects often fall prey to the same fate as passion projects, which is that they are victims of time and finances. And because some of our talent became unavailable, we had to shorten the project to the version you see today, which meant a re-write and a shoot that August in 2011, and some final pick ups of the train in 2013.
We needed the right set of circumstances to properly achieve the vision, and it was the perfect time to bring our old collaborator Rich Douglas aboard for the score, and bring in new friends, like Chris and Curtis at Syndeo Studios to help create the ending graphic while we worried about everything else. Sometimes having particular standards makes for a long wait.
Timing is important too. The 765 and her stewards, the Fort Wayne Railroad Historical Society, are experiencing an incredible resurgence. Sold out trains. Thousands of passengers. Millions of smiles and waves exchanged between strangers. As the group continues to operate their time machine throughout the country on excursions, our collaborative downtown attraction project Headwaters Junction continues to make waves and is included in the City of Fort Wayne’s Riverfront Development Study.
Thanks are in order for our friends at the Hoosier Valley Railroad Museum and later, at the Cuyahoga Valley Scenic Railroad, for letting us invade and take over. Thanks also to our cast and crew, comprised of course of dear friends, partners, professionals, and loved ones.
You can see more behind the scenes photos here at the railroad historical society’s Flickr.