A Winter Olympics fairytale. How the BBC’s 2018 Winter Olympics trailer overcomes the monster.
For an event that takes place in a world of white, the BBC’s 2018 Winter Olympics trailer could hardly be darker.
Y&R London has created the latest campaign for BBC Sport to launch the 2018 Winter Olympics.
As the story opens, we meet our hero – a lone female skater – in a snowy landscape. The sky darkens rapidly and she finds herself facing, and then racing, her demons. They take the shape of wolves (that traditional fairytale bad guy), harrying her down the slope. Suddenly she’s Red Riding Hood on ice, skating for her life.
Next the story plunges us into a nightmarish landscape as a snowboarder slaloms around gigantic cyclopean eyes in the snow. A skeleton racer swerves sinuous dragons, giant black hands threaten to engulf a downhill skier and a figure skater spins ever faster to avoid the grasping tendrils that burst through the ice.
It’s a story we instinctively recognise. It’s Little Red Riding Hood, it’s Jack and the Beanstalk. It’s Perseus and the Sea-monster, David and Goliath, Harry Potter, Jaws, Lord of the Rings. In fact, the Winter Olympics trailer is another retelling of one of the seven basic plots described by Christopher Booker: ‘Overcoming the Monster’.
In this classic plot, the hero decides to take on a monster which is terrorising the land, defeats it against all the odds and is rewarded with a great prize (traditionally in the form of a princess or kingdom, but an Olympic gold works too).
The BBC’s agency, Y&R London, takes this story and gives it a subtle yet powerful twist. In this new version, the 'monster' doesn't take the shape of something obvious, like the elements or the other competitors (although they make up part of it). This time the monster is inside the competitors’ heads.
The voiceover booms at us to ‘Trust in what you know. Not what you fear.’ before the animation brings these fears vividly to life. As director Alan Smith told Creative Review, the team creating the trailer focussed on “the disorientating effect that fear can have on an elite athlete’s performance, and how they can overcome it.”
And overcome it they do.
At the crucial half-way point, the downhill skier is swallowed up by the darkness... and then drags himself through to the other side. Then comes a rapid-fire sequence of athletes triumphing over their fear and storming to victory. The closing image introduces them as 'The Fearless', standing proud over a sea of vanquished monsters.
Y&R London has taken a message everyone could do with hearing, woven it into one of the world's oldest stories and wrapped it all up in beautiful animation to turn this tiny trailer into an epic.