Microsoft

“Plans are of little importance, but planning is essential.”
-Winston Churchill

Role: Director

If I showed you the original creative brief for this project, you’d scarcely believe the outcome. Collete Davis is a fascinating and charismatic character—a professional race car driver in a male dominated field, who is fiercely independent and hard working. For the last three years, she has been building her own drift car. To gain a competitive advantage, she has turned to technology—she put a Microsoft Surface into the dashboard to tune her engine in real time. Microsoft asked me to capture her first day at the track with this new car.

Fast forward to 6am the day of the shoot. It’s late February, I’m in the desert north of Los Angeles, and I get a text from Collete saying, essentially “something is wrong with the engine, we can’t drive it.” These things happen in racing. But still. Shit.

She adds that she’s bringing another car, which is a street car also capable of drifting, and she’ll be there as soon as she can. Head and heart empty, I drive to the track, rehearsing how I’ll explain to the crew that there is no plan.

Things get worse. Collete is bringing the back up car in a large trailer, but shortly into the trip it gets a flat, causing her to pull off the road. My crew and I stand around in the desert and wait. Four hours pass. It’s February, so we’re losing light fast.

I won’t lie—I’ve been here before. There is always something on shoot days. They are crucibles that force you to accept what life throws at you and make the best of it. It’s why you plan: to keep you calm. When Collete arrives, we take stock. We start chatting with her brother Chris, who is visiting from Texas and has been helping her out recently. He is a total character, and turns out—he’s never drifted before. In a flash, the idea comes together. I send them out on the track for an impromptu lesson with his older sister.

What transpires is fun and funny, but with a surprising dose of heart. It’s my favorite type of story: engaging to watch, but with a deeper theme. This one about family and the surprising ways it helps us grow. In a weird way, it all ended up being worth it.