Far From Home: Presented by Bridgestone
Short Documentary Series
Client/Network: The Olympic Channel, Snapchat, NBC Sports, & Bridgestone Tires
Think Less Services: Creative, Packaging & Sales, Production, Post-Production
Partners: Boardwalk Pictures and Madica Productions
Awards:
- Telly Awards Gold: Series - Web-series
- Telly Awards Silver: Series - Documentary
- Telly Awards Silver: Series - Web-series, Non-Scripted
Throughout the world, aspiring winter athletes struggling with little support from their country put their lives, financial assets, and time on the line in hopes to compete and represent their country on the most significant competition stage in the world: the Winter Olympics. This documentary series follows six of the worlds most unlikely Winter Olympic athletes as they strive to break barriers and make history for their respective nations. From the Caribbean to the Himalayas, South America to the Middle East, these athletes share the dream of walking into the Olympic arena with the whole world watching as their country’s flag waves above them. This is the story of their inspiration. This is their journey.
Shot on location in:
Shiraz, Iran | Tehran, Iran | Albertville, France| Oberstdorf, Germany | Steg, Liechtenstein | Arezzo, Italy | New Delhi, India | Manali, India | Sao Paolo, Brazil | Kingston, Jamaica | Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia | Seoul, South Korea | Lake Placid, New York | Park City, Utah | Calgary, Canada
Watch the Snapchat Series.
Watch the additional long and short form films.
“Not only has the show reached over 9M unique viewers, but we’ve heard nothing but glowing reviews internally from colleagues who have been wowed by the brilliant footage and inspiring profiles. Suffice to say the Olympics (and these Olympians) are now top of mind for millions of Snapchat Users around the world. Gold medals all around.”
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Greg Justice
Manager of Sports Content, Snapchat
The Challenge
We faced the unique challenge of conceptualizing and selling a high-volume, global content series to the Olympic Channel. The project, "Far From Home," aimed to spotlight the underdogs of the Winter Olympics - athletes from countries without the infrastructure to support their winter sports ambitions.
The logistical puzzle was immense. We were tasked with delivering a vast amount of content from around the globe, while also crafting a creative narrative around each athlete in an embedded style. This meant venturing to the athletes' home countries, capturing their personal lives, and following them on their path to the Olympics, including their training and participation in the Olympic qualifiers.
The challenge was not just in the volume and geographical spread of the content, but also in maintaining the authenticity and cinematic quality of each athlete's story. We had to ensure that each film represented not only the athlete, but their country as well, across three different formats for mobile, digital, and linear television.
Despite the logistical complexities, we were driven by the opportunity to tell these inspiring stories, and the reward of overcoming these challenges was the creation of a series that truly captures the spirit of the Olympic Games.
The Concept
The Olympic rings are more than a symbol of athletic prowess and resilience; they represent the triumph of the human spirit. The Olympics have always been a stage for the world's elite athletes, but the 1988 games introduced us to Eddie the Eagle and the Jamaican Bobsled Team - underdogs who became household names without ever reaching the podium. Their stories reminded us that our circumstances don't define our dreams, and that we all have the potential to defy the odds.
In "Far From Home," we spotlight six such underdogs. These athletes hail from countries without snow, let alone the infrastructure to support their winter sports dreams. At Think Less, we set out to capture their journeys in the six months leading up to the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics. Our vision was to weave narrative storytelling with authentic documentary filmmaking, creating a cinematic portrait of not just the athletes, but their home countries as well.
We crafted three versions of the series to cater to mobile, digital, and linear television audiences. Our team spent 18 days with each athlete, journeying to their home countries to capture their personal lives and following them as they trained and competed in the Olympic qualifiers. The result is a series that truly encapsulates the spirit of the Olympic Games and the inspiring stories of those who dare to dream.
The Creative
We broke down our visual language for this project into six separate categories as follows:
Interviews
Our main interview with each athletes provided a window into the soul of our character and the bedrock of our episodes. We composed our main interviews with the athlete’s center frame with double the amount of headroom.
On Snow Competition
The moments captured during competition highlighted the unlikely country our athletes hailed from and their natural ability to perform in a winter environment. We shot competitions with a similar style to the training footage, but made the visual language smooth and graceful to showcase the clarity and elegance in the way our athletes exhibit their sport.
Portraits
Cinematic portraiture played an essential role in the visual language of this series. We used portrait shots to showcase our athletes as bold and empowered trailblazers. We used a variety of gimbal systems to encompass a smooth movement while capturing portraits of our athletes in all categories of the visual language.
Training
Because our subjects hail from countries not known for winter sports, it was vital for us to capture their unique dryland training routines in a way that kept their environment and culture as authentic as possible. We wanted the training footage to be high energy, kinetic, and dynamic to bring the viewer into the world of our athletes.
Home and Road life
These moments were slower than our previous approaches. We showcased the most relatable aspects of our athletes. We took a fly on the wall approach, showing our athletes interacting with people, items, and places important to their everyday life. We shot handheld to encompass subtle and organic movement.
Culture
We used visuals of our athletes’ cultures to symbolize the relevance of the Olympics to the challenges of today’s world. We focused on scenics that paint the landscape, faces from the locals that make up the community, the culinary taste of each country, and the set of unspoken and unwritten rules for working together.
The Edit
We believe that the magic of editing begins in pre-production. Our roadmap for the story was laid out in a series treatment, which our editors used as their guide.
We crafted a unique post-production workflow for this series. Each day of shooting was followed by the creation of dailies. From these, we assembled sequences of vérité dialogue and selected b-roll footage. We then transcribed the dialogue and used these transcriptions to build paper edits, following the structure of the treatments we had created for each episode.
As we began to shape the rough cuts, we held weekly viewing sessions with the director and other key creatives. These sessions were an opportunity to review the cut and gather feedback. The director then had the final say on which feedback to incorporate as we moved towards the client review stage.
In terms of color grading, we aimed to stay true to the natural hues of our vibrant shooting locations. Our goal was to capture the authenticity of these places and the people who call them home.
