Meet Cute wasn’t necessarily a big title with large producers behind it, but it was distributed and marketed by Peacock as an Original Film, starring Kaley Cuoco (Sheila) and Pete Davidson (Gary). In this dark romantic comedy, Sheila finds herself in a “Groundhog Day” time loop situation, reliving the same ‘meet cute’ moment over and over again. Unaware that meddling with the past could ruin the future, Sheila goes even further back in time to turn him into the perfect man – even though he was already pretty perfect.
I worked with Paradise on the trailer GFX and edit, art directing style frames and adding motion, making sure it looked consistent across all campaign assets. I worked heavily with Blackspot to create an intriguing cinemagraph animation for 9×16 social media buys (although I wish we had OOH placements as well – such as WeHo bus shelters). The camera pulls back through the mirror and a rippling effect introduces a new world at the same bar with varying reactions between talent.
Skills Involved
Motion Art Direction, Static Design Art Direction, Branding, Activation Design, Versioning
Agencies / Studios
Blackspot, Midnight Oil, Paradise
When
July – September 2022
Hero Trailer
This trailer featured a strong mix of “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” – creating the illusion that it’s emitting from a distant radio. Ironically, working on this campaign and rewatching the trailer countless number of times reminded me of Bill Murray waking up to “I Got You Babe” each morning.
Because this story takes place on one romantic night in New York City, the lights on the bridges and buildings in the background transformed into soft circles of light, creating a bokeh effect. I leveraged this and applied a similar style to the internal/main title cards – using blue and yellow as contrasting colors (blue is also the color of the time machine/tanning machine).
Key Art
Because production had already wrapped, we didn’t have a chance to do a custom shoot with Kaley or Pete. Therefore we had to rely on high-res unit photography to comp together the final result. A challenge that we faced were the many many bottles of liquor in the background that needed to be adjusted/blurred out for legal reasons. Kaley Cuoco contractually has final say over her likeness in the key-art, so we had to head-swap and make several adjustments.
With the help of Blackspot, the animation/cinemgapraph was a lot of fun to work on. Pulling inspiration from The Matrix (of all films), as the camera pulled out of each mirror I wanted there to be a level of distortion that felt like a watery ripple. In the end, the file was massive in size considering the number of repeated layers, bottles, talent, and atmosphere.
HERO ART
CINEMAGRAPH (CLICK FOR AUDIO)
Premiere
The Premiere was held at the Midnight Theatre on New York. I worked with the Peacock Activation team to help design the step & repeat red carpet backdrop, drinks and snacks, screener slides, and more. We helped design a small social activation that allowed participants to take a photo in an environment that replicated the location of their first date, “Panna II” – an Indian restaurant with memorable overhead lights. Once you step into the theatre itself you’re surrounded by screens that displayed different ambient city environments from the film.
