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Saint Luke's Hospital: Called to Excellence

There is no such thing as a boring assignment. Unfortunately, a lot of opportunities are squandered when creatives hear an initial client ask and then pile assumptions onto it before they even start working. That could have happened here, but it didn't.

The initial ask was a testimonial TV campaign using real former patients. To me, that still left a tremendous amount of leeway. A testimonial doesn't have to be a talking head. It just has to be a story. And you if you tell it beautifully, you have a piece of art, whether it's a fictional story or a true story.

We decided to approach the stories as reenactments in documentary. We confirmed the basic series of events with each of our subjects and used those to write rough scripts and storyboards. Each person played themselves in their respective spot and told their story in their own voice, too. We used the scripts as a starting point and then recorded more audio that I captured as interviews to enrich the scripts.

I hired Justin McClure to produce the campaign, and he hired Nicholas Vedros to direct. We had a budget of $600,000 and shot everything in Kansas City, where the hospital is located and where we were able to afford 10 full shooting days including underwater and aerial photography.

The thing about asking people whose lives have been saved to tell their stories is that you're also asking them to relive the time they almost died. It was an emotionally intense experience, and each person handled it differently. Some people had to take a minute now and then. Some cracked jokes. It was an extremely demanding but fulfilling experience for everyone involved, and everyone was really close by the end of the shoot.

Based in Atlanta.
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