8Fade to Black

" If the piece stinks, just make sure it has a good ending.

Bryan Cook "

The cynical bit of advice in the epigraph above was something I once said to an agency client –who we will call Bob – towards the end of a session. Bob's commercial was, as we all freely admitted, a train-wreck. The shoot had been one of those where everything that could go wrong – weather, actor with food poisoning, director with delusions of grandeur – did go wrong, and we had not been able to entirely mitigate the issues in post. So, as we sat there in my bay, peeking through our fingers at the blight upon our culture that we had created, we brainstormed options. My argument, and the one which won the day, was that we needed to discard all logic and make ...

Get The Art of Short Form Content now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.