Some client work is under NDA. Email me and I'll send the password right over: dougblack1@gmail.com
If web copy is writing for space, then video scripts are writing for time. Every moment is more valuable, and every line gets heard exactly once.
Concept, narrative construction, and voiceover for a branded documentary on Audi's first plug-in hybrid.
Audi was launching its first plug-in hybrid, and the brief was to make people feel something about an electric plug. The answer wasn't in the car. It was in a moment that happened exactly fifty years earlier, at a folk festival in Newport, Rhode Island, when a young musician walked onstage with an electric guitar and got booed for it.
Most of the film is constructed from interviews: people who were at Newport in 1965, alongside Courtney Barnett, Jim James, and Colin Meloy speaking to what that act of defiance meant across the decades. I built the narrative out of those transcripts, then wrote the voiceover that carried between them.
That one single plug meant power.
We could hear the future, and it was loud.
Plugging-in changes everything, and there's no looking back.
The film has to travel fifty years and arrive at a car without the arrival feeling like the point, so the voiceover does the traveling. "We could hear the future, and it was loud" is the hinge. It's about 1965 when you hear it, and about the e-tron by the time the film ends.
Launch films, social, and campaign copy for SoundCloud's first subscription.
The films had to feel native to SoundCloud itself: energetic, a little chaotic, unapologetically music-obsessed. Not polished brand film. Something that could sit on the platform without announcing that a marketing department made it.
From jumpstyle to hyphy.
From death metal to live sets.
From freestyle to Thai jazz.
From 8-bit to 2-step.
From yacht rock to pirate metal.
Every line is a range, and every range is a joke that only lands if you know both ends of it. The campaign's argument was that the platform contained multitudes, so the copy had to prove it five words at a time rather than claim it in a sentence.
Concept and scripts for digital spots connecting IT professionals to the people they support.
B2B technology advertising usually addresses the buyer and forgets the user. The idea here was to invert it: build each spot around someone doing physical, industrious work, and let the Android device sit at the centre of it without becoming the subject. The audience was IT professionals, and the argument was about the people they serve.
Creative direction and scripts for a film series on the history of wearable technology, shown at the Adorned exhibition at Milk Gallery.
Intel and Milk built MUZSE around the point where technology meets fashion, and these films had to work in a gallery rather than a feed. No scroll, no skip, an audience standing still and choosing to watch. That changes what a script can do. It can be slower, and it has to be worth the standing.