Responses by Marty Hoefkes, creative director, Broken Heart Love Affair.

Background: Boys and young men are increasingly learning their morality through social media. Like any tool, it has good and bad uses; however, if you just leave it to do its own thing, it trends toward hate and misogyny because that generates the most discussion. What we really want is for people to re-examine their relationships with algorithms and see them as something that needs to be maintained and kept healthy before it’s force-feeding you poison every time you open an app.

Design thinking: We talk a lot about things going viral, but nobody ever really made the connection between viral content and sickness before. The idea that your algorithm sits somewhere on a spectrum of healthy and sick really intrigued us.

Challenges: Having a semi-comedic lens on a topic this serious can be a little frightening. We needed to walk the line between entertaining and funny, while still treating the subject matter seriously. This balance was something we made sure we were emphasizing to our clients throughout the process.

Favorite details: There are lots of subtle and not-so-subtle bits of the script that really nail it for us. But hitting the plosive on “AI slop” is the one that gets me every time.

Time constraints: We were worried about the length of the script and how much there was to memorize in such a short time between locking in our cast and the shoot date. But incredibly, our doctor Ralph MacLeod was such a pro that he was already off-book at the casting. Can’t imagine what it would’ve been like if we had to feed lines every other take.

New lessons: Originally, we had a totally different idea for tone that was more pharma-style, but our director Erica Orofino pushed hard to play it like a serious drama. It didn’t take much for her to convince us, and we think it’s much better for it. It’s always a good lesson to relearn: when someone is passionate about an idea, be ready to hop on board.

brokenheartloveaffair.com