• Client: Cycling Films, Edinburgh
• Subject: High-profile film launch after five years of audience build-up during production (client portrait here)
• NationBuilder Architect: Ben Kempas, Film & Campaign
• Graphic design: Joakim Karlsson
• Database Maintenance: Aga Slawinska, Film & Campaign
• Domain: www.timetrialfilm.com

Client portrait: How the people behind Cycling Films Ltd. started audience build-up five years ahead of the premiere of their documentary TIME TRIAL

This week, the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) saw the world premiere of TIME TRIAL, a Scottish documentary following controversial road cyclist David Millar.

Around 1400 people packed into the Royal Theatre Carré for the premiere of TIME TRIAL in Amsterdam

As a subject, Millar would be compelling even to a director who isn’t as passionate about cycling as TIME TRIAL helmer Finlay Pretsell. He cuts a glamorous enough figure to be known as ‘Le Dandy’ to French cycling fans, and at the time of his retirement in 2014 was regarded as one of the best cyclists in the world, having worn the leader's jersey in all three grand tours. He’s also a divisive figure: the last ten years of his career as a cyclist were spent in very public mea culpa, after he was caught using performance-enhancing drugs in 2004, reinvented himself as an anti-doping campaigner after a three-year ban, and traced his fall and rise in a frank autobiography, Racing Through the Dark (2011). Almost every road cycling fan has an opinion about Millar; he’s acquired the sort of celebrity that means his smallest pronouncement causes ripples. Not just a compelling subject, then, but a potential box office draw.

Film & Campaign’s Ben Kempas was involved at various stages of the project – building and running its various websites and experimenting with an early version of 360° video – and we’d like to offer our congratulations to the production team, Cycling Films, and to the Scottish Documentary Institute, who initiated the project. 

Competing in the highest-profile competition in the biggest documentary film festival in the world is an outstanding platform for a world premiere and should open up a number of further screening and distribution opportunities for the film in the future. However, an advantage TIME TRIAL may have over the other fourteen films in the competition when it comes to the distribution stage is that there’s already an audience, dedicated, engaged, excited about the project and ready to the spread the word, awaiting this documentary.

• Client: Cycling Films, Edinburgh
• Subject: Early audience engagement for high-profile feature-length project
• NationBuilder Architect: Ben Kempas, SDI Productions
• Graphic design: Joakim Karlsson
• Domain: www.davidmillarfilm.com (no longer live, has been superseded by the Time Trial NationBuilder site)