Money Feelings

The short form. One answer, one payoff, captions animating word by word as the person speaks.

A financial brand asking people how they feel about money usually gets performance — the composed answer, the one rehearsed for the room. So we took the interview out of the room. Recruited from the public, not from the client roster. Sealed the questions until shoot day so the first reaction was the take. Then cast each person to the brand pillar their own tape already put them in, instead of casting a type and coaching them toward it.

The care they name comes from the people around them. What they’d want from someone they trust comes before the brand speaks — and every film ends on the same three words.

Creative Director on Money Feelings, the film arm of Northwestern Mutual’s Trust Campaign. I built the casting instrument — one questionnaire, one self-tape, every candidate answering the same set unguided — and the pillar-match method that reads the tapes and places each person where their own words already put them. Wrote the on-camera question ladder, set the shoot rules, and directed alongside production through an eight-interview day in DUMBO.

Casting ran July 13–24. Shoot July 29. Edit through three client rounds to final delivery August 17. Thirteen cuts across :06 and :15 lengths, 9:16 native with 4:5 and 16:9 masters off a single vertical-first capture.

The full answer — pauses kept in, reactions kept in. The gaps are the footage.

Eight released principals: six hero, two reserve. Screened for consent and releasability before a pillar was ever attached. The person qualifies first; the casting follows.

Every session opened the same way — what’s your relationship with money like? — a question that maps to nothing and is never read back. It drops the person into their own money story before anything is asked of them. The planned question follows; the rest of the conversation goes where it goes.

I designed the casting instrument and the audit that ran behind it, so the pillar assignment came out of evidence in the tapes rather than a casting hunch. I wrote the eight on-camera questions and the directional intent behind each one — what we wanted the person to reach, without telling them to reach it.

On the day I ran the creative through eight interviews in ten hours, on the street, with weather and light we didn’t control. In post I ran the cut reviews across three client rounds and protected the thing that makes the work believable: the pauses. The temptation in a :06 is to cut them out. They’re the reason anyone believes it.