In the world today, there's pressure to have easy, quick answers to big questions. But issues and people are complex; there are no easy answers. To promote The Atlantic's belief in the importance of questioning your long-held beliefs and answers, our campaign idea was to have notable personalities ask themselves a tough personal question, and then debate multiple sides of it with multiple versions of themselves. In this launch film, Michael K. Williams (an American actor born in a Brooklyn ghetto), debates the reasons behind why he’s been frequently cast as a gangster - reasons that range from his personal decisions to the influence of society on his identity.

For over 160 years, The Atlantic has been world-renowned for creating high-quality, well-researched, thought-provoking articles. But those stories had become more famous than the brand itself. In order to change this, we tapped into a truth in The Atlantic’s DNA: the unrelenting desire to challenge themselves and their readers to overturn assumptions, reexamine long-held truths and confront the status quo. The Atlantic wanted to convey that spirit of restlessness and reinvention through a campaign designed to promote the brand itself, and change perceptions of it from dated, stuffy and highbrow to culturally relevant and “awesome.” We established two objectives in order to achieve this: make a splash within the media industry, and create a meaningful platform that their target could identify with.

This was a deceptively tricky piece to make, athough hopefully the feeling is one of watching four friends just hanging out and having a thoughtful discussion. But obviously there’s just one guy playing those four characters and the degree of difficulty of this performance is actually hard to fully understand. We had to carve out 4 distinct characters, and keep track of them. We had stand ins – other actors -- reading the other roles against Michael, trying to inhabit his rhythms, and often he couldn’t see them because there was a green screen separating him from the background that his other “personas” would inhabit. So it was pretty time consuming. We had to use a splitter to composite performances to make sure each one tracked with the other because we wanted to leave this as uncutty as possible.