The art of looking back to move ahead

There's a scene from Mad Men that nails something that's been on my subconscious mind my entire career.

Nostalgia is ephemeral and hard to pin down, but when you capture it in the right way, it’s like a warm ray of light.

“Well, technology is a glittering lure, but there is the rare occasion when the public can be engaged on a level beyond flash if they have a sentimental bond with the product… Teddy told me the most important idea in advertising is ‘new.’ It creates an itch, and you simply put your product in there as a kind of calamine lotion. But he also talked about a deeper bond with the product: nostalgia. It’s delicate…but potent.” - Don Draper, Mad Men Season 1 Episode 13 

Above: The 'new' may instantly catch our attention, but what really drives it home is something that touches our heart.

The 'new' may instantly catch our attention, but what really drives it home is something that touches our heart. Nostalgia is ephemeral and hard to pin down, but when you capture it in the right way, it’s like a warm ray of light. It softens the edges with a hazy glow and makes us long for something just out of reach.

Sometimes that ache in your chest actually feels good. You might not even have lived the thing you’re missing, but you still understand it.

The Portuguese have a word for nostalgia: saudade. A bittersweet yearning for what’s passed. Sometimes that ache in your chest actually feels good. You might not even have lived the thing you’re missing, but you still understand it. That’s the beauty of it, it connects us as humans through shared emotion.

From toys to artefacts

Like many children of the 80s, I loved building spaceships out of Lego. But, when I would finish my creations, all vibrant and pristine, I would have an inexplicable urge to bury the ship in the dirt so that I could excavate it. 

In doing that, it would transform from just another Lego toy into an ancient artefact, full of wonder and untold stories; there became a history to it. Looking back, I realise I was nostalgic, even at seven-years-old. I felt deep down that time makes things meaningful. That instinct has been with me ever since, and it shows up in the way I approach my work.

Above: Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories promo worked because it was a combination of the past and present working together, which is sometimes how nostalgia works best.

Where old meets new

Sometimes nostalgia works best when the past and present talk to each other. In working on the promotional campaign for Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories, that same instinct guided us. 

The band insisted on shooting on 65mm film for a few reasons. It would give us modern, 4K resolution with crisp, fine-grain details, but it also still had a 'vibey' feeling, as they liked to call it. That feeling was the colour, the aura and vague essence of a time passed, like Studio 54 and scenes from Phantom of the Paradise were polished and beamed into the present.

Sometimes nostalgia works best when the past and present talk to each other.

Another project with this ethos was Billy Joel’s video for his recent comeback single, Turn The Lights Back On. We used the latest deepfake tech to create younger versions of him singing. That was the hook, the shiny magic trick. But what people responded to most wasn’t the new technology, it was something that happened by accident. 

The plan had been to shoot a seamless one-take, drifting through different eras. But the motion-control rig broke at the end of the shoot, leaving us without the final scene. In the edit, we filled the gap with a montage of real, archival footage of Billy across his career. Suddenly, the song and video became about time, memories and life itself. Watching his story unfold made people reflect on their own stories. It wasn’t the visual effect that made them emotional. It was authenticity, the truth of a life lived. 

Above: A broken motion-control rig meant that Fu's promo for Billy Joel meant the final scene "became about time, memories and life itself".

As I type this, it’s now hitting me why my instinct was to create that montage as our resolution. It echoes the final scene of Cinema Paradiso, one of my all-time favourite films. That movie is essentially a love letter to nostalgia. It closes with a montage of memories spliced together and, like Toto watching those memories from an empty theatre, you can’t help but be overcome with emotion.

Here & now

The year is 2025. AI tempts us with shortcuts, taking the easy path to creation. Social media encourages us to chase everything new, with constant updates on pop-culture and refreshes on the latest memes. Twenty-four-hour news feeds throw rage bait in our faces for clicks. There seem to be constant new technological breakthroughs, instantly making last week's latest advancement obsolete. Our collective attention spans are getting shorter and shorter. Does anything truly stick? 

I think nostalgia is a welcome reminder to slow down and remember the things that touched us, that moved us.

I’m not against technology. We, as humans, have a natural curiosity and excitement for progress and innovation. In watching the recent documentary on the early days of Industrial Light + Magic, there was a beauty in the innovation, born out of the needs of telling a story. The difference now is that the technological push feels more driven by money, speed and the fear of becoming obsolete.