Sharpie S-Gel "Morgan DeBaun"

A Sharpie S-Gel film featuring Morgan DeBaun, directed by Rick Wayne. It runs thirty seconds and it is classified here as documentary rather than commercial, which is the most informative thing about it.

The S-Gel films are a small series of founder portraits, and the strategic idea underneath them is consistent: position the pen as the tool of people who build things of consequence rather than as a writing instrument with a smooth ink flow. The companion film in the series features Alexis Ohanian, who founded Reddit at twenty two, and that piece was picked up by People magazine, which is not what normally happens to a pen campaign. The reason it happened is the register. Films that behave like profiles get read as profiles.

Thirty seconds of genuine profile is harder than thirty seconds of commercial. A commercial can be written and then executed. A profile has to be found, and at this length there is room for exactly one true thing about the person. Everything depends on identifying which one, and on getting the subject past the version of their own story they have already told a hundred times.

Wayne's stated method points directly at that problem. He has said that real human emotion is a superpower, that some of the strongest moments he has captured came from people who had never been on a set, and that he treats play as a directing tool rather than a reward, because a set that feels like a playground is where the magic is actually found. Applied to an interview, that means the useful material almost never arrives during the questions that were prepared.

The film was published in May 2024, part of the same run of Sharpie work that includes the Creative Marker anthem, the Brian Anderson piece and the first year of Rookie of the Year.