OnePlus

The challenge

OnePlus ran a student marketing competition. A friend and I entered it and won, which came with a month inside the company, and the chance to make the thing we'd pitched.

The idea

A day in the life of a student, made by a student.

We made ninety seconds about an ordinary student day, lectures, the walk home and everything in between, with the phone just there in the background like it is in real life.

The work

My friend and I came up with the idea, and I wrote the script, storyboarded it and recced the locations. It was shot on the phone itself, so we worked with the production team on a rig to make the handheld footage look deliberate instead of wobbly. I shadowed the director on the shoot and signed off the edit.

The rig, built to make handheld look deliberate.

Same rig, out on the street.

On shoot.

The scribbles it started as.

The kit, laid out.

OnePlus Europe's office, 2017.

It went out on OnePlus's own channel to promote a 10% student discount.

The results

It got around 12M views, 216,000 likes and 9,231 comments, all organic, and became the 8th most-viewed video on OnePlus's channel.

Then the founder of OnePlus tweeted about it and named us.

The founder's tweet, crediting us by handle.

I'm proudest of that tweet. Anyone can put a view count on a website, but you can't fake the founder naming you back in 2017.

I was very early in my career. It's still the biggest audience anything of mine has reached.