The fifteen-second version

By about the second half of the month the film has been cut down.

It runs three minutes on the first night. A house, a family, somebody coming back after a long absence, a thing forgiven at a table. People watch it on purpose. They forward it to each other. The brand appears in the last five seconds, and by then those five seconds have been earned, because the viewer gave three minutes and got a small story in return.

Then the plan asks for the fifteen-second version, and the fifteen seconds kept are the final five with a little setup in front of them. What gets protected is the logo, the pack and the line the brand paid for. What goes is the three minutes that made anyone willing to sit through the logo.

The result is not a shorter story. It is the receipt for a story the viewer never saw. The minute was still borrowed, and this time nothing went back across the table.

Cutting a long argument down by keeping only its conclusion does the same thing on a page. The reader arrives at the claim with none of the reasons that would let them believe it.

A fifteen-second piece has to be a fifteen-second idea. One observation, one turn, one thing the viewer keeps. That is a different brief, not a smaller one, and it wants writing before the three-minute version rather than after it, by the same people, in the same week.

Almost nobody works that way. The long film is the interesting job, and the cutdown goes to whoever has the afternoon.