Most of the case studies on this page are about work almost nobody was allowed to see: concept films made for audiences you could count on one hand. This one is the other thing.
One client, national scale, and two briefs from opposite ends of the storytelling spectrum. On one screen, the full launch-video suite for the My McD's app: a brand-new product that needed introducing, explaining, and selling to the whole country at once. On the other, a retrospective charting McDonald's history in Canada: decades of brand memory, told backwards instead of forwards. Product future and brand heritage, from the same desk.
The two briefs turned out to be the same skill wearing different clothes. A launch has to make something new feel familiar. A retrospective has to make something familiar feel new. Both are translation jobs, and translation is the through-line of everything on this page: take a thing that lives in one form, a product roadmap, an archive of five decades, and render it into something an audience can feel in ninety seconds.
There was a quieter discipline in it too. McDonald's is one of the most recognized and most rigorously governed brand systems on earth. Elsewhere on this site I talk about building brand systems; this was the other side of the trade, working inside one, at national scale, where the guidelines are law and the craft is precision within constraints. If you want to understand what makes a brand system hold up under volume, spend some time inside one that has held up for more than half a century.
And unlike most of this page, you may have actually seen some of it.
A longer essay version of this case study is in progress.