Hidden Nuggets: Fastrack – Hands – His & Her Story

The fundamental problem of the watch category while creating a TV spot is the sheer size of it. It is small.

Watches are in the lifestyle category, and usually led by design and style statements, that lead to interesting propositions, but the biggest challenge is trying to give it screen presence seamlessly in the story, and not relegate it to just a product window.

While that was the challenge that Fastrack was facing. While the audience had bought into the personality, the quirkiness of the brand, it became important to showcase the design interestingly.

Moreover, the design team at Fastrack had worked hard to give some extremely great designs for the watches.

So this interesting problem reached Rajesh Ramaswamy (Ramsam) at Lintas.

While narrating a story, it might seem extremely jarring and in your face, if you cut to a close-up of the watch without reason. And reasons to include a watch in the story could be extremely limiting.

So the brief was as follows:

“Write a story where the watch is shown prominently”. With the Move On proposition!

There were preconditions – the watches cannot be shown as a product window, and the watch/watches have to be woven into the story.

Rajesh remembers “After pondering over it for a lot of time, it struck me that we always rely on conveying stories through emotions, that are either spoken by the protagonists and their expressions.

Why not narrate it by only conveying it using hands? Just so that throughout the story, the watches that needed to be showcased are in every frame.”

Given that Ramsam had worked on the brand for years together, the story was not too difficult to create.

It was a story of how a girl and boy (obviously sporting various Fastrack watches) meet up, spend time together and decide to part ways. With its own twist and quirks. All narrated by only showing their hands.

But there was a new problem. While the story was appreciated, it seemed like it was one-sided. And was written from a Man’s perspective.

And Fastrack was a gender-neutral brand.

The logical conclusion was to write another film with the perspective of a woman, but there were no budgets for a second film. Moreover, it could be boring and repetitive.

That’s when Simeran Bhasin (brand head, Fastrack) prompted “Is there a possibility where you use the same footage and tell it from a woman’s point of view?”

Ramsam found the idea creative, innovative and an absolutely brilliant solution keeping in mind the logistics and budget.

So it was the same footage, with two perspectives. Like the way, they narrate suspense thrillers.

All he had to do was write the voiceover from the woman’s perspective with a different ending.

Sudhir Makhija was the filmmaker and was among the few if the not only film worldwide which gave different perspectives using the same footage at that time.