By Randi Altman

To celebrate February 29, otherwise known as Leap Day, beer-maker Stella Artois released a short film featuring real people who discover their time together is valuable in ways they didn’t expect. The short was conceived by VaynerMedia, directed by Division7s Kris Belman and cut by Union partner/editor Sloane Klevin. Union also supplied Flame work on the piece.

The film begins with the words, ”There is a crisis sweeping the nation” set on a black screen. Then we see different women standing on the street talking about how easy it is to cancel plans. “You’re just one text away,” says one. “When it’s really cold outside and I don’t want to go out, I use my dog excuse,” says another. That’s when the viewer is told, through text on the screen, that Stella Artois has set out to right this wrong “by showing them the value of their time together.”

The scene changes from the street to a restaurant where friends are reunited for a meal and a goblet of Stella after not seeing each other for a while. When the check comes the confused diners ask about their checks, as an employee explains, that the menu lists prices in minutes, and that Leap Day is a gift of 24 hours and that people should take advantage of that by “uncancelling plans.”

Prior to February 29, Stella encouraged people to #UnCancel plans and catch up with friends over a beer… paid for by the brand. Using the Stella Leap Day Fund — a $366,000 bank of beer reserved exclusively for those who spend time together (there are 366 days in a Leap Year) — people were able to claim as much as a 24-pack when sharing the film using #UnCancelPromo and tagging someone they would like to catch up with.

Editor Sloane Klevin

For the film short, the diners were captured with hidden cameras. Union editor Klevin, who used an Avid Media Composer 2018.12.03 with EditShare storage, was tasked with finding a story in their candid conversations. We reached out to her to find out more about the project and her process.

How early did you get involved in this project, and what kind of input did you have?
I knew I was probably getting the job about a week before they shot. I had no creative input into the shoot; that really only happens when I’m editing a feature.

What was your process like?
This was an incredibly fast turnaround. They shot on a Wednesday night, and it was finished and online the following Wednesday morning at 12am.

I thought about truncating my usual process in order to make the schedule, but when I saw their shooting breakdown for how they planned to shoot it all in one evening, I knew there wouldn’t be a ton of footage. Knowing this, I could treat the project the way I approach most unscripted longform branded content.

My assistant, Ryan Stacom, transcoded and loaded the footage into the Avid overnight, then grouped the four hidden cameras with the sound from the hidden microphones — and, brilliantly, production had time-of-day timecode on everything. The only thing that was tricky was when two tables were being filmed at once. Those takes had to be separated.

The Simon Says transcription software was used to transcribe the short pre and post interviews we had, and Ryan put markers from the transcripts on those clips so I could jump straight to a keyword or line I was searching for during the edit process. I watched all the verité footage myself and put markers on anything I thought was usable in the spot, typing into the markers what was said.

How did you choose the footage you needed?
Sometimes the people had conversations that were neither here nor there, because they had no idea they were being filmed, so I skipped that stuff. Also, I didn’t know if the transcription software would be accurate with so much background noise from the restaurant on the hidden table microphones, so markering myself seemed the best option. I used yellow markers for lines I really liked, and red for stuff I thought we might want to be able to find and audition, but those wasn’t necessarily my selects. That way I could open the markers tool, and read through my yellow selects at a glance.

Once I’d seen everything, I did a music search of Asche & Spencer’s incredibly intuitive, searchable music library website, downloaded my favorite tracks and started editing.  Because of the fast turnaround, the agency was nice enough to send an outline for how they hoped the material might be edited. I explored their road map, which was super helpful, but went with my gut on how to deviate. They gave me two days to edit, which meant I could post for the director first and get his thoughts.

Then I spent the weekend playing with the agency and trying other options. The client saw the cut and gave notes on both days I was with the agency, then we spent Monday and Tuesday color correcting (thanks to Mike Howell at Color Collective), reworking the music track, mixing (with Chris Afzal at Wave Studios), conforming, subtitling.

That was a crazy fast turnaround.
Considering how fast the turnaround was, it went incredibly smoothly. I attribute that to the manageable amount of footage, fantastic casting that got us really great reactions from all the people they filmed, and the amount of communication my producer at Union and the agency producer had in advance.

Randi Altman is the founder and editor-in-chief of postPerspective. She has been covering production and post production for more than 20 years.