TREATMENT BY
DYLAN MARANDA
and
SEQUOIA
A pleasure to be able to dig into this creative with you. The trust between us as creatives is truly invaluable. It’s always an honour to hone an idea with folks whose taste and creative sensibilities I deeply respect and align with.
Might I just mention the added honour of getting to explore an iconic Canadian brand. My dad was a chef, and when my parents were starting their bakery, they had little time to cook at home. Many a night was "KD Night" — a charming combination of KD, cut-up hot dogs, "fancy ketchup" (BKL reference for you there), and cottage cheese. Something we all secretly looked forward to, both for its taste and for having more time to spend together as a family.
Know that every treatment of mine is the starting point of a discussion. That being said, I think you have a really, really good idea here, guys. My goal with these ideas is to augment, not alter, because I think this has the potential to become a great Canadian campaign.
I'm excited to bring you our best in this pitch...
So let's get right into it…
A heightened heartbeat. A cutting chill. A rise in tension. A tingle up your spine.
It's not hypnosis…
It's not a trance…
It's not a spell…
It's a tightening of your chest. A slight panic. A sliver of madness.
It's raw. It's human. It's pure, distilled craving.
What I love most about this spot, and where my strengths lie as a director (and let’s be honest, my humour as a whole), is that it gets to take itself seriously. But it’s in that very devotion to the idea that we find the humour. It’s where we commit to the bit with our triggers, where we beat the dead horse with our reaction shots.
This is a universal feeling. We shouldn’t lead a horse to water. If we do this right, if we trust that everyone watching has felt this themselves — we get that perfect payoff of a slow build to our KD reveal. We let them in on the hunger early, but it’s the why behind that hunger, explained through our flurry of reminder triggers, that creates the “ah-ha” moment. The payoff comes when the viewer realizes that only KD will solve it.
Think with me for a moment about what it feels like to have an intense hunger craving:
It creeps up on us. It starts slow, but it builds. It erodes our resilience and frays our temper. What was once easy to deal with or shrug off becomes a gnawing annoyance. It slowly begins to consume our every thought. We become irrational. We get distracted. We fucking panic.
Until we get that thing we want to eat.
Then it all seems too silly in retrospect, while our friends laugh at us, secretly knowing they’d probably be exactly the same.
This is how it needs to feel when we watch this. In our moment of hunger, it’s serious business. It’s primal, hardwired into our circuitry.
The audience shouldn’t just sense that — they should feel it themselves.
Easier said than done, so how does that translate into meaningful filmmaking technique?
Let’s chat through some ideas…
This isn’t slapstick; this isn’t “wink wink, nudge nudge” — I see these performances as very grounded, with the self-awareness of the comedy we’re going for. This idea works best when the characters aren’t in on the joke. To them, it’s life or death. But to us, it’s in the dryness of the triggers that we get permission to laugh.
We should be cackling at the monitor, knowing what triggers we’re cutting to and the payoff we’re building toward. But when we step onto set to work with the actors, it should be all about the craft. ;)
There’s a balance, but having a strong background in acting, it’s one I feel very comfortable striking.
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This is the big one.
Drawn-out zooms have been used to immerse an audience in a character’s inner turmoil since the early days of cinema. It’s ingrained in our collective film psyche as a signal that something is amiss. Knowing these spots are only 15s, I worry that whip transitions might create a feeling of disorientation, never allowing the audience to settle into what we’re inviting them to experience.
Instead, I’d have our character simply going about their day...
Until they stop... distracted by something...
The zoom starts. Something is amiss.
Only then do we cut to that first trigger.
It’s vague, but that’s okay, because it’s interesting, and naturally occurring within the scene.
We cut back to our character. Something new catches their attention. We’re still slowly zooming.
We cut, still zooming, to the second trigger. It’s even closer to that iconic shape.
Back to our character. We’re close now. We see the panic building in their eyes.
Now a new eyeline.
We hold on their face before cutting to something even more excruciating.
Our final trigger. The one that most closely resembles the iconic KD shape.
Still zooming.
The exact moment the audience realizes it’s about KD is the same moment we match cut to an extreme close-up of the noodles.
That’s when we finally relieve the tension. We begin to zoom out. The fork enters frame.
We see the bite. Finally, our character is satisfied.
Excited to discuss these together. I feel strongly that anything we add to this idea should be refinement, not needless addition. Everything should serve to elevate the creative, never distract from it — and I think these techniques do exactly that.
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ZOOMS ARE A CLASSIC WAY OF BUILDING INTRIGUE...
By holding on the looks of our characters, we guide the audience to lean in. It's montage theory, Eisenstein, Battleship Potemkin--
We indicate that, before we cut, whatever comes next is going to be part of a pattern the audience is ready to pay attention to.
Without something like a zoom technique that guides the audience's focus and our character’s emotional journey, we lose the power of the joke and the trigger concept as a whole.
To reemphasize, this is not a trance; it is not hypnosis.
The zoom is a part of that distinction— when the performances that we are seeing are so grounded in reality, we need a filmmaking device. Let our audience in; indicate to engage with the story we are telling.
The zoom serves as our device. When we look at these examples, we are ready and prepared for the cut and shot that comes next. In our case, the triggers that make us have that undeniable KD craving.