The Tennessee Department of Safety & Homeland Security came to us with a mandate from the state legislature. Lawmakers had just set aside funds at the urging of the governor to create a statewide PSA campaign on gun safety. The team at the Department of Safety had seen our other work and asked if we would lead the effort to create their “Safe Storage Saves Lives” campaign.
Safe Storage Saves Lives
The Project
The Project
The challenge
The issue of gun rights is about as politically sensitive a topic as you’ll find in Tennessee, so our biggest concern at the outset was that viewers — on either side of the issue — would tune out if we presented a message that felt political or appeared to lean one way or the other.
At the same time, our client needed a powerful PSA with a clear point of view that grabbed people’s attention. So what we came up with was a slice-of-life story illustrating a simple truth that no one disputes: kids are really nosy.
Watch it here.
Our creative process
We wanted to stay away from overly-dramatic storylines meant to surprise and shock audiences. Our story needed to feel natural and uncoerced. And that led us to the treatment we presented, which steers viewers in one direction until the very end. We orchestrated a storyline that doesn’t feel like a gun safety commercial at all. Nothing about the cinematography, music, or lighting suggests that anything bad is going to happen. It all feels like just another ordinary day. And that’s the whole point: we wanted to play on the fact that these moments can come out of nowhere, without warning. After all, no one hears foreboding music in real life.
Final thoughts
Most of us involved in this project have kids. And so it was sobering, even though we had layers of security protocols on set, to hand a child a firearm. (Sometimes, as filmmakers, stark reality hits the hardest when we’re creating a fictional environment.) This was a heavy one to film, but it was made in the spirit of sharing a message that might just save lives.
