Ball "140 Years"

An anniversary film for Ball Corporation marking 140 years, directed by Rick Wayne. At 1:19 it is one of the longer pieces in the selected commercial work, and the length is doing a job.

Legacy films fail in a predictable way. Given a long history, the obvious structure is a chronology: founding, expansion, war years, modernization, present day, logo. The result is accurate and inert, because a timeline is a list and a list does not build. The alternative is to treat the history as a set of continuities rather than a set of dates, and to find the thing that has been true across all of it. That gives a film somewhere to arrive.

Wayne made this film in the same period as another centennial commission, the Warner Bros. 100 Years documentary series, and the two together show a director who gets handed legacy brands more than once. The stated approach on the Warner Bros. work is instructive: build the piece around specific contemporary perspectives rather than a single monolithic narration, so the result feels like a living celebration instead of a corporate retrospective. Handling a long history well requires treating it as something still in motion.

It also requires a particular posture toward the client. Wayne has said that great films are not directed but collaborated into existence, and that the relationship between brand, agency and crew is itself the creative. On an anniversary film the brand is not a stakeholder reviewing a piece of communication. It is the subject, and it knows its own story better than any outside team will. The director's contribution is a point of view about which parts of that story still matter.

The film was published in May 2024, in a run that also included the Sharpie Creative Marker anthem, the Xzibit spot and the first year of Rookie of the Year.

It runs 1:19.