“Be authentic” - the words we kept saying to ourselves when we set out to make an opening Tease unlike any other. Imagine the opportunity to borrow the Stanley Cup for a few days and bring it to a frozen lake town in Northern Minnesota full of devout hockey fans known literally as Hockeytown USA.

The smiles on their faces, the tears in their eyes, that once in a lifetime opportunity. That’s what “Our Time” afforded us the opportunity of doing. A love letter to the grit and sheer determination it takes to get to the Stanley Cup Final. This film featured dozens of real people playing for a vast assortment of leagues. Love of the game runs incredibly deep all across this country, from the people of the frozen tundra of Minnesota to the urbanites in cities like NYC and Philadelphia. Our singular goal was to capture that devotion.

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We partnered with Linda Shulz and Jean-Luc LaDouceur at ESPN with a mission to tell a real, anthemic, and emotion-driven story about the very heartbeat of hockey, the passion and sacrifice required to get to the Stanley Cup Final. The goal was not only to create a powerful opening tease for Game 1, but also to create Opens for the entire playoff campaign.

We knew we had to treat it like a documentary, but it still had to be cinematic. The sport moves at a break neck pace and we had to find a way to slow it down, but not disrupt the action, this was the challenge, to let the game organically happen, but still execute our vision. We called it Doc Style.