Gift of the Gabberer: Tim Jones
Earlier this year, Tim Jones and his team set about the seemingly impossible task of bringing a teenage victim – of the Parklands shooting in the US – back to life.
Grab a comfy chair and a tea. This interview about the Unfinished Votes campaign contains the ultimate embodiment of empathy and compassion.
An interview with Tim Jones, EVP, ECD McCann Health New York.
“You can’t understand someone until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes.”
A tall asking at the best of times. You could walk in their shoes, best you can. You can ask questions. You can observe their actions, reactions, demeanour, what makes them happy, what makes them fearful. But how can you do that when the person is sadly, tragically, no longer with us? When all you have to go on is two photographs and some tweets?
Earlier this year, Tim Jones and the creative team at McCann Health had to do just that. Bring back a parent’s son to voice an important message.
The result was the remarkable ‘Unfinished Votes’ campaign that reimagined Joaquin Oliver, a victim of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas School Shooting in Parkland, Florida in 2018. The message? “Vote, because I can’t” – just in time for the 2020 US election.
Tim Jones was the Creative Director on the campaign and spoke to Guest Editor, Andy Wright about the unimaginable process of bringing a father and mother’s son back from the dead.
Andy: Tim. First off, I’ve watched the video and it looks so real. I mean, everything looks real now. But it would be good to understand where you started. Where did the idea come from?
Tim: I know this client, I know this issue. I think everyone who's familiar with recent American history will relate to the issues with gun laws. Unfortunately, it's one of those things that's just always on the top of our minds. We were chatting amongst ourselves and we were talking about that particular school shooting and just how tragic it was. All of those young kids, just, at the peak of their life.
They were wiped off. They no longer had a voice and we were in the midst of the upcoming election. The discussion just naturally went to the kids who would have been eligible to vote this year for the first time. Those were 16, 17 lost votes.
So as a team we wondered how many people lose their lives to gun violence. A lot of lost votes. Policies or results with some States are swung by 10,000 votes. 500 votes in some counties. It's marginal, you know, every vote matters.
It's important that everybody who's eligible to vote, can vote.
So the obvious question is, how do we go about replacing those lost votes? Encouraging people who haven’t thought or even considered registering to vote to give them some sort of inspiration. To say to them, look these are people that have lost their votes and their lives.
And, you know, that got us all. I mean, we were in the room and just like, you know, it hits you in the gut.
We reached out to the client, Manuel. Manuel Oliver, he's the father of Joaquin.
I'll tell you what, in my career as a creative, we often have to present big, bold ideas to people and clients, but...
Presenting an idea that was as outrageous and personal as this, we had to be very, very sure it was the right thing. There's a very fine ethical line, between an ad campaign and understanding the right level of sensitivity. The sensitivity that is a human being who has been taken and others who have experienced some of the deepest loss imaginable.
I'm a father and I can only imagine, you know. I, I can't imagine actually...
We wanted to make something that would enable a powerful change within society. So, luckily for us, when we did have a call with Manuel, and his wife, Patricia, they were both very open-minded. They've dealt with the issue, they've gone through the sorrow and the pain, and now they're in the fight phase.
They asked, “How are we going to do this?” And we were like, wait, what? We just didn't expect it. The whole process was treading that fine line between, a human soul and technology.
What type of questions do you ask a father? How do you talk to them about their son? That was hard enough, and then there were some really small things. Things like… you can't say stuff like we're going to shoot the film, you know, you can't use words like shoot.
We had to speak to the production company to say, look, when we speak to the parents, these are our industry words. These are different words to them. And the empathy of understanding the power of a word as small as that could affect them. It was our duty to respect that and work hard at it. And that being said, Manuel and Patricia are the experts. They know what needs to be said, and they're not shy. So they kind of egged us on, which is great. But we were always treading very carefully. It’s a very intense process.
Andy: When you're creating a campaign, you'll often have personas or people that you kind of want to represent. But in this case, this person is no longer around. You haven't got anything to role model, but you've got to recreate them. How do you go about recreating someone who's no longer with us?
Tim: Yeah. That was the biggest challenge. Obviously, likeness is one thing, but personality and soul is another thing.
We worked so closely with the parents, the parents were the creative directors they were involved in every step of the process.
The sad thing about Joaquin is that because he lost his life so unexpectedly, we had very little imagery to go off, we had very few videos. It meant things like voice were an issue. We didn’t have enough frames to create 3d character movement. I don't know how much you know of deep fake technology and artificial intelligence – you need thousands of minutes of footage to create that ultra-realistic effect in the machine.
It's very easy to do with politicians and actors because so much footage exists. But with Joaquin, unfortunately, we didn't have that. In fact, it came down to one or two images of him that were the hero image and because he was a teenager, every image looked different. His face was continually changing.
One minute he looked 12. The next minute he was 14. So we ended up having to create a completely new process. We had two images. And then we had to create a CGI model of his face and use that model to export the millions of frames to fill in the missing data on the computer.
It took months. The whole process took six or seven months. It was so process heavy that we’d have to wait a few days for the machine to spit out the imagery and that's when we’d find it would be totally wrong, or inappropriate, I mean sometimes it was scary.
We’d have to cancel some reviews with Manuel and Patricia. We couldn’t show them what we had created.
We also had to find an actor who had the physical features of Joaquin and then use the AI to mask over his face. We had to reconstruct the voice as well. The actor that we ended up going with was very, very close in resemblance and physical structures to Joaquin.
We made sure that he was fully immersed in the Oliver family. He spent time with Joaquin’s sister, his best friend. We had one-to-one video sessions where they were telling him how he spoke, how he articulated things, how he emphasised words. So when we were on the film sets, he, he was Joaquin.
Andy: That's a huge responsibility. There must have been some heart-wrenching moments where the parents looked around, and even for them, it must've been a double-take.
Tim: The most powerful thing that Manuel and Patricia said, was that this is the hardest thing they’ve ever had to do to go through. This pain over and over again, hearing the voice, seeing their son. But they said we’re doing it – because it has to be done.
The call that we had presenting the final cut was probably the most powerful moment I've had in my career. You’re just watching, and you know, Manuel took his glasses off, he wiped the tear from his eye and you could feel he was tense and angry.
And then he said, this is so fucked up, that it has to fucking happen. We have to fucking do this. People need to know. For Patricia, the mom, the whole film, she was just smiling. And then at the end she said… that was my Joaquin.
Andy: It’s like they've been given a tribute or a Memorial.
Tim: Yeah. And no one else has that luxury asset for themselves. Everyone else has photos. But in this instance, you've got this living thing and we can use it however we want. We could have a live interview with Manuel.
Andy: Where does that end though? On an ethical basis. It must be tempting to want to interact with the son that you’ve lost. Immediately you can imagine some people developing a business opportunity – this is Black Mirror, right?
Tim: Yeah. It's VERY Black Mirror. We said from the beginning, this campaign is just for this message. It was a lot for the family to go through.
It was near his birthday. It was the big election. We were very cautious that any misuse of this technology would be blurring some ethical moral lines. It's a blessing and a curse, I guess.
They've created such a tribute for him, not just this campaign, but everything that they do as an organisation has been amazing. They keep fighting in his name. They’ll use any creative way to get the message across and ultimately to bring about gun reform or gun safety laws in the U.S.
Andy: So how do you do another job after that?
Tim: Tell me about it. I mean, there were calls where you go from something really heavy and deep like this to...hey, an online banner ad. It’s like that for all of us on the team. Cause, we've been doing it for about eight or nine months to get this from inception to completion. We celebrated with the parents because it was so successful.
It had over 2 million views, it was phenomenal. It's been on every news channel. I woke up one morning and it was on the Piers Morgan show. But we all agreed, we need a bit of a breather. Maybe the next one is not so deep or intense because it's emotionally draining.
And at the end of it, you know, everybody involved, everybody could feel him. I think we all feel so close to the family. It's very personal to all of us now.
Andy: I know what you mean. I’ve worked on campaigns where you’d have a track or a song that was the focus, and you’d hear it every day for months. But you had that with a person. Probably more intensely than perhaps his family had in his final months?
Tim: It's so true. Very emotionally taxing for sure. I don't think any of us involved from production to account service...
I don't think any of us have ever felt this personally attached to any piece of creative work. It just gets to your gut, you know, it speaks to your heart.
Andy: Did you get any support through this? In terms of psychological safety, people must have been affected by what they were working on.
Tim: The great thing about McCann and McCann health, in particular, is that it’s kind of at the core of what we’re about.
We have employee assistance programs. We have access to free counsellors, anything we need. If there were any issues or if anyone was feeling burdened, they were covered.
Before the project I had a big team meeting and said to everyone, look I'd love you to help us as a creative team to bring this to life. But I understand if, maybe some of you disagree with the views. America is a very split country, maybe someone feels very uncomfortable about this idea from a moral point of view. And then, maybe someone can't deal with this emotional burden.
Luckily everyone involved was 110% behind it. And I think we all gave each other support when times were tough. I think we all cried a few more times than we should have, it was a very, very emotional and intense project.
Andy: Well, I think you've done an amazing job with this. It's been fascinating to hear how you went through it. Thanks for sharing.
Tim: Thanks so much. All the best.
