"A Future Begins" is inspired entirely by real-world events.

The idea is to dramatize the harsh reality of – and optimistic possibilities for – family farms by creating a deep emotional connection to the tragic near-loss of one family farm. Then create hope with the second and third acts of the story wherein a young, diverse community of farmers employs modern, sustainable farming practices to save the family farm.

The film uses exacting detail to display dozens of real-world regenerative farming practices. At farmers.Chipotle.com, we've created a series of documentary shorts about real family farmers working with Chipotle.

"A Future Begins" is created and produced by the same team who created "Back to the Start." Still, the campaign extends beyond the new film and song, including a Carhartt farm-fashion collaboration and a range of digital, social, and retail extensions that were not possible a decade ago.

The film was made entirely in-camera, using stop-frame animation, with no additional visual effects. Everything from snow, to water, to flickering projector light, was captured on set by a hard-working team of craftspeople and animators. Stop-frame is a traditional technique where each animation frame is captured individually, with our two animators moving the puppets (and everything else) one tiny increment at a time. It's a laborious technique where nothing is left to chance: every aspect of the production is considered, from avocados the size of your little fingernail to flooded tomato fields. The team strived to push the medium—combining a single fluid camera move across ten separate sets, each at a successively larger scale—all in service of the story. The result is something that can't be replicated in CG, with the creator's touch at the heart of every millisecond of the final film.

Two years in the making, the production featured 82 tiny resin puppets, including 12 sheep, ten cows, 12 pigs, ten chickens, 12 farm helpers, ten characters on campus, and 16 audience members.

The director's commitment to authenticity meant that only real farming techniques used by Chipotle suppliers were depicted. This included solar panels to provide shade for animals, plots of land dedicated to rewilding, and polytunnels to cover pepper crops.

We launched the campaign with a YouTube Masthead. We followed this up with its broadcast debut to 77 million households on Thanksgiving during the NFL's Raiders vs. Cowboys Game in a first-of-its-kind 2:20 isolated commercial break—the only tv spot for the campaign. We also produced two behind-the-scenes films that live on YouTube. One looked at the making of the film, and the other focused on Kacey Musgraves, the Grammy-winning Country music superstar we tapped to reimagine the song "Fix You" for the film.