Director Tim Damon recently took Saatchi Los Angeles into space to prove to their agency creatives and newbie interns that “Nothing Is Impossible.”
For the special in-house Saatchi team-building film titled, “Nothing Is Impossible,” Damon documents agency intern Jeremy Strege launched into Earth orbit via multiple high altitude balloons. For the record, the intern was real, so were the balloons, and so was the flight. Well, kind of. The intern doesn’t really go into space.
“Saatchi wanted to create something memorable,” says Damon. So they came to me for help. To make the flight look realistic, I salvaged a seat from a 50’s vintage fighter jet and attached six huge weather balloons.” To document the action, Damon took his film crew and a team of Saatchi creatives up to Big Sky Movie Ranch in Simi Valley, California.
In reality, our intern never goes forty feet above the ground. Watching the film, however, our hero ends up in Earth orbit, which looks eerily real, thanks to actual footage taken from the balloons. “Seth (Rementer) and I wanted real high altitude footage, so we rigged the balloons with GoPro cameras and tracking devices, filed a flight plan with the FAA and let them go,” explains Damon. “The balloons reached about 100,000 feet, and were recovered by Saatchi’s Lyndsey Wilson and Namrata Abhyankar over 100 miles away, in San Luis Obispo. The data cards were fine, but we had a hard time opening the camera cases due to the pressure differences generated during sub-orbital flight.”
The film concludes with a copy room discussion between agency creatives about handling an undoable deadline. “We just sent an intern up into space. If we can do that, nothing is impossible,” he says.
