Audi:The script for a branded documentary that doesn't show the car until the end.
Audi / 1000% / Milk Studios
The Challenge
Audi was launching its first-ever plug-in hybrid. The technology was new territory for the brand, and for most of its audience. The brief was to make people feel something about an electric plug, which is, historically, not an easy thing to make people feel something about.
The answer wasn't in the car. It was in a moment that happened exactly 50 years earlier, at a folk festival in Newport, Rhode Island, when a young musician walked onstage with an electric guitar and changed everything.
My Role
- Concept development
- Script
Agency
- 1000% / Milk Studios
Format
- Branded documentary film
What I owned
- Role Concept development, narrative construction, voiceover script
- Agency 1000% / Milk Studios
- Format Branded documentary film
- Featuring Courtney Barnett, Jim James, Colin Meloy, and witnesses to Newport 1965
The Insight
Audi was already a partner of the Newport Folk Festival. That's where the idea started, not as a marketing hook, but as a cultural connection worth exploring. Because Newport wasn't just a music festival. It was the site of one of the most controversial moments in American music history: Bob Dylan going electric in 1965, to a crowd that booed him off the stage.
Fifty years later, nobody thinks Dylan made the wrong call. The people who booed him look, in retrospect, like they were on the wrong side of something important. Which made it a perfect frame for what Audi was doing: another first plug, another moment where "electric" was the more interesting direction, even if not everyone was ready to believe it yet.
"Another first plug. Another moment where electric was the more interesting direction."The idea in one line.
The Film
The script I wrote brought together people who were at Newport in 1965, witnesses to the moment, alongside current artists like Courtney Barnett, Jim James, and Colin Meloy, who could speak to what that act of defiance meant across the decades. The structure traced the reverberations of Dylan's choice forward through time, landing at the present moment: Audi's own electric first.
The Audi e-tron appears only at the end. On purpose. The film earned Audi's presence the honest way: by being worth watching before the car ever appears.
The writing.
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. My job was building the narrative out of those transcripts, deciding what each person's story was for and where it belonged in the arc, then writing the voiceover that carried between them.
Three lines of that voiceover: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.