Winter Olympics: Speed

To celebrate the one-year mark to the 2018 Winter Olympics, the marketing team produced a series of hype promos to get Pyeongchang on the mind. 

It’s not often as an art director that I have editorial control, but this ten-second promo was an exception. Crafted around the theme of speed, this promo presented some creative challenges. We had access to beautiful athlete footage but we were short on usable track footage that could fill a ten-second spot. While we had access to broadcast competition footage, we aimed to create a spot with distilled imagery that honed the focus on bobsled and speed alone. So, we got creative and played with composition, space, and time.

Sound design tied this spot together and helped to dictate the momentum. Starting with an ethereal base, we layered in the NBC chime as well as the first three notes of John William’s Olympic theme. To provide the speed and action, we ramped up the pacing of the spot with faster cuts backed by the sound of a steel blade cutting through ice.