David Blaine is not someone who can be succinctly summed up. He has built a decades-long career of consistent innovation and death-defying stunts. David Blaine in 60 Seconds was designed to give the National Geographic and greater Disney audience a “crash course” in David Blaine’s illustrious career to drum up hype for his new title: David Blaine Do Not Attempt. This title was David Blaine’s National Geographic debut–and a departure from our typical content. We wanted to solidify Blaine in the National Geographic universe in a way that our audience would enthusiastically accept, in a mind-bending short video.
This piece relied on both captivating visuals and guiding narration from Blaine to keep audiences engaged on this breakneck journey. This required multiple phases of preparation: research, footage sourcing, script writing, shooting, and post production editing. Our first step involved multiple hours of scouring David Blaine’s website, Wikipedia, and other sources to find the stunts he is most proud of and famous for. This included his specials (ie Frozen in Time, Drowned Alive) as well as records he has broken (holding his breath for over 17 minutes on Oprah).
We then worked to cull these moments down into what would translate best on social media, and contained archival footage we could source either via licensing from other networks or David Blaine himself. Once we determined the stunts we wanted to include/ could include with footage rights, we set to work on scripting out the best 1-2 sentence summaries of each stunt that exemplifies their incredulity without getting bogged down in specifics. This required more in-depth research on the specifics of the stunt, getting creative with analogies, and sending multiple drafts to our editorial research team to ensure accuracy.
Once our concept and script were ready, it was time to shoot with David Blaine himself. As one could likely gather, Blaine is incredibly meticulous and contains a great need for perfection. Shooting this piece required on the fly script rewrite with David as a direct collaborator, editing phrases and even adding stunts he was particularly proud of. We shot this monologue multiple times, with different cadence and emphasis on certain words until David was completely sure we had what we needed. After we’d shot our custom footage with David, we then went to work on sourcing footage from all the stunts mentioned in the video to stitch together into one fast-paced video. This process was also a massive collaboration between our creative agency, higher-ups, and David Blaine himself. Through an extended production process we eventually landed on the final video in under 60 seconds.
Finally, our distribution strategy. In order to maximize our reach to new audiences, we posted this on our main @NatGeo handle, @NatGeoTV, @DinseyPlus and @Hulu. These four accounts cemented David Blaine as National Geographic and Disney talent within the TV sphere while pushing this content out to those who are likely less familiar with him.
This video performed incredibly well organically, reaching over 2.1 million views across platforms with over 18 thousand engagements. Audiences were blown away by David Blaine’s impressive resume, sharing nostalgia for older specials, and expressing excitement for new episodes of Do No Attempt. We felt this video was incredibly successful in highlighting David to new audiences and re-engaging past fans by reminding them of Blaine’s incredible legacy. Another great success was the strong working relationship we cultivated with Blaine through the making of this video. Our long production process established mutual trust as we continued to produce more creative content for this campaign.
