Campaign
Impossible Happens
Concepting, Casting, Video
The ask
Equinox puts out a yearly campaign promoting their Personal Training business: Impossible Happens.
It tells the story of real-life trainers and their clients—and how their clients surpassed their goals.
In 2019, I was in charge. But we needed it to have a new twist. We couldn’t do long-form video essays anymore, they had to be but :30s.
So my art partner and I had to re-concept the campaign.
The concept
We needed to do a lot in a very short amount of time in this campaign: demonstrably show progress in only :30s.
So we re-centered the focus around the campaign with mantras.
We concepted videos where a mantra that the trainer repeats would push the client to the next level.
(I wrote about half the mantras; the others were supplied by the trainers.)
The cast
It’s not really my job to cast people for our campaigns, but, things change.
My art partner and I were charged with casting the campaign. She made sight visits to our LA clubs to speak with the training managers; I called around the midwest and New York to see who we could pick up.
Casting is typically the hardest part of this campaign. They can’t be too old (the typical PT clientele) and we needed a mix of race and gender.
It took a couple months, but we got very, very lucky. With a lot of teamwork, we landed Travis Wall and his trainer Sean. Malcolm is a martial artist who was training for the Olympics with his trainer Eric. Asiye and Sharina are a power client-trainer duo, and international Kristine glowed on camera with her (relatively new to the company) trainer Wendel.
We got very, very lucky. It’s only on the strength of this cast that this campaign rocks.
The shoot
When we had our concept and cast in place, we could finally shoot. We hired the stellar Clara Cullen (Chloé, CHANEL) to bring our vision to life.
We shot in Equinox East 53rd Street (it closes on the weekend). As in every shoot, I was on set to make sure we captured what we needed—the movements (workouts are kinda my thing) and the moments where the mantra brings the client out of failure.