“I turned to my team and said, guys, we need to prepare to make a documentary. And they look at me, like, are you crazy? We're doing our biggest global campaign ever for 30+ countries and now you're throwing us a documentary?”

Conceived to celebrate inDrive’s 10th anniversary, the Inner Drive documentary recently won not one, not two but FOUR Dolphins at Cannes, a phenomenal achievement. Brand Director Misha Chernyshev takes us behind the scenes with the Marketing team.

A whole new world: getting started

Neither I nor anyone in my team had ever done a documentary on such a scale, so it was a mix of courage and craziness to actually dare to start this project. But I think we were super lucky, because almost accidentally we found a fantastic production company and a fantastic director that assembled the whole production within the given time and money.

We had chosen five of the countries where inDrive is present, we had five different directors, and we looked through around 800 stories, narrowing them down to several hundred, and then to 4 heroes.

If we had known what making a documentary entails, we would have known that there were so many obstacles ahead and freaked out. But because we didn't know, we just went for it. And with every step we found another challenge.

But I had a fantastic team – in particular, two very brave ladies, and I have to give them kudos: Tatiana Geller, the project leader, and Julia Andriyanova, the creative leader.

I need a hero: how we found the Inner Drive stars

We had an open call for drivers’ stories through the app in the countries where we wanted to shoot. I think we had around 800 submissions with short lines about who they were, etc. The team narrowed these down to a few hundred, asked for more details and then narrowed it down even further. Then we and the production company did Zoom interviews to find the real cool stories.

We also looked for our inVision hero, Obadiah from Nigeria, with help from the inVision team. And then, of course, we needed the internal stories. The top managers were clear, those who established inDrive – so Sasha Pavlov, Arsen, and Yegor; but then there were people like Anastasia, who had a very tough story of leaving Russia, moving to Kazakhstan and not being sure whether she and her family can go back. We were looking for those stories as well.

The neverending story

Making a documentary is completely different from our daily work. You can not control and approve 100% of the script and scenes, because there is no exact script. Yes, we had pre-approved lists of questions to different heroes – that resulted in 120 hours of production materials. But what we learnt is that you can only see documentaries after the edit.

We did 9 different edit versions, and the final edit was 90% different from the initial one.

The first edit we did, we looked at it and said, “that's really bad”. We thought about doing the butterfly effect, how it's all connected, but it was not clear. It was like French salad: everything with mayonnaise, and you don't taste anything.

So then we rolled it back and said “let's do it chronologically”, but we didn't actually shoot with chronology [in mind]... and then we did other completely different things. And we had a lot of internal debates. We were working 14-18 hours every day from January to April.

And because we saw it like 200 times … our eyes were not fresh, so when we went through the premiere [we didn’t know what to expect]. I remember one guy said something wonderful: “I've been working for this company for many years, but all I see is numbers. And now for the first time I saw real people and real stories and problems that we solve through our product. Thank you for making this.”

Wow, that was the best review I could ever have – and it was revealing for me.

Delivering the Dolphins

We submitted Inner Drive in four categories hoping that we would at least get one silver or bronze so that we would be super happy – but we won in every category! We didn't expect it, because this is the biggest award for corporate documentaries.

If you look at the brands that were competing – Booking.com, Volkswagen, MasterCard, Vodafone, HSBC, Austrian Airlines, Royal Mail, UK, Shell, Ernst and Young, etcetera – they’re big brands with budgets much bigger than ours. And so we were overwhelmed … because honestly we expected like one silver (maybe!).

And it's not just the words of the manager – but I'm so grateful to my team.