The crew of ten: distanced, masked, and rewriting the playbook at Churchill Downs.
A national Kentucky Derby spot for Woodford Reserve: cellist Ben Sollee, alone, inside an empty Churchill Downs. One of the first national ads of the pandemic: built in eight days, aired on NBC during the virtual Derby, and now past five million views.
Energy BBDO had a striking concept: cellist and composer Ben Sollee performing “My Old Kentucky Home” alone inside an empty Churchill Downs, and a fixed NBC air date for a Derby that had been postponed for the first time in generations. Travel was shut down. They needed a Kentucky crew who could deliver national-broadcast cinematography, fast, and keep everyone safe at the very start of the pandemic. There was no room for error.
Chronicle Cinema rewrote its production playbook from scratch. In four days we organized the shoot and built a safety strategy no one had run before: ten crew split into three distanced pods, each with a sanitized backpack of gear, gloves, masks, and food, and every team lead on their own wireless monitor so nobody had to crowd a screen. An Arri Alexa anchored the shoot while a two-person DJI Inspire aerial unit and time-lapse cameras captured the silence of the 150,000-seat stadium.
The hardest problem became part of the art. Recording clean audio six feet apart on an open, windy field should have been a liability. Instead, the soft echoes and birdsong of an empty Churchill Downs folded into Sollee’s score and gave the piece its ache.
Delivered in eight days and aired on NBC during the virtual Derby, “My Old Kentucky Home” drew 1.3 million views in about 24 hours and has since passed five million. It captured how Kentuckians felt in that moment, and proved that, done right, safety isn’t the enemy of quality.