It's About the Journey

It’s About the Journey is a commercial I directed for One Recovery Bucks, a service that helps people take the first step towards recovery through an online self-referral. The brief called for something honest about the damage harmful behaviour does, without tipping into melodrama or shame.

I built the film on a single morning and a single decision. A man records a voicemail promising to get help, and three flashbacks show what brought him there: a teacher refusing to release his child at the school gate, an A&E discharge wristband on a kitchen table, a night that ended on the kerb outside a pub. Rather than dramatise the drinking, I showed only the aftermath, and let voicemails from his wife, his sibling and a friend stack up across the cuts. Each one draws a boundary. Together they map his isolation without a line of exposition. The film returns to the present on a matched frame, and he opens the referral page.

The two timelines are separated entirely in camera. The present is warm, lit by morning sun and shot close, so the audience sits beside him. The flashbacks are cooler and framed wide, an objective view of the fallout. Sound does the rest: dialogue and voicemails lead, over a minimalist score of felted piano and cello that stays melancholic but leaves room for hope, sparse in the past and slightly fuller as he moves forward.

The result is a piece that treats a difficult subject with restraint and still lands its call to action, giving the client a film that can sit in front of the people who need it most.