How to run a marathon blind and have the world see

A chance encounter in December 2019, in which Ogilvy Paris business partner Thibault Loué helped a blind person who couldn't find his way around the Parisian Metro, sparked an undertaking to draw light on "the story of those who do not see, those we do not see: Invisibles."

Teaming up with filmmaker Cédric Dubourg, the pair decided to attempt to run the Paris Marathon blindfolded, and document the process. Gathering help from the association A2CMieux, which helps visually impaired people practice their sport, Loué was able to train with two visually impaired paratriatalon athletes - Mériam Amara and Thibault Rigaudeau - whose techniques and guidance helped him find a way towards the finish line.

The result is an impactful, playful and eye-opening [pun unintended] 20-minute doc that not only shines a light on the struggles of many but also celebrates the importance of collaboration in order to overcome them.

We caught up with Loué to ask him a few questions on running the race of his life.

The film intertwines live-action and animation. Why was that choice made?

When I was writing, I knew that we would integrate the part where I tell the genesis of the idea at the beginning of the film and that we would have no images to illustrate it. We're in an era where you must get people into the story from the first few seconds, so we absolutely had to find a way to illustrate one minute of face-to-face camera.

I had spotted this technique in the brilliant series Losers on Netflix or in the documentary The Dawn Wall. I found it extremely immersive and effective, so in the end, it was both an obvious and a default choice.

We're in an era where you must get people into the story from the first few seconds, so we absolutely had to find a way to illustrate one minute of face-to-face camera.

Cédric and I wanted to keep this part very simple, both in the illustrations and in the animations. It just so happens that at the time I was looking for references, a very close friend of mine was publishing her first book with a cover illustrated by Boris Zaïon. He has a way of using one predominant colour in his work and I found it very elegant. I was inspired by his work to work on the images in this sense with our illustrator Clément Praslin.

I chose blue by pure aestheticism. It's a colour that I love and that I wear a lot. It's also the colour of the cap I wear for all my races, which now has a real symbolic value.

How was the shoot? Were there many challenges (other than the whole 'running whilst blind' thing)?

I think the biggest challenge was to manage to be focused both on the blindfolded race and on the film. We were constantly in between and that made it very difficult to manage. Especially for a first documentary.

Cedric and I are used to being on commercial shoots where we can do things over and over again that are very scripted and controlled. Obviously, we had a shooting list for each sequence, but we quickly realized that the essence of the exercise lies in the authenticity of the shots, and this is something that cannot be redone. I couldn't have pretended to run the first time blindfolded a second time, so the planets had to align systematically between the two of us and our brilliant DOPs Emmanuel Bernard and Etienne Durand who were. 

Cedric and I are used to being on commercial shoots where we can do things over and over again that are very scripted and controlled.

Much more specifically, the race. We knew this was the end of the film, so we had to make it interesting to watch. And from my humble experience, it's never very entertaining to watch people running.

I usually shoot my own races with a GoPro where I try to bring a tone and my personality to keep it entertaining. But this was something else, we wondered how to film it from an outside perspective without it becoming indigestible to watch. 

Our solution was to multiply the cameras (Red, Blackmagic, GoPro, DJI), the shot values, and to beef up the construction of our relationship with Cédric in the narration so that people would want to see us evolve as a duo and not just be about the race itself.