Responses by Frédéric Marchand, cofounder and president, Locomotive.

Background: A Better Normal is a positive social experience that consists of a short film and personal digital time capsule for all citizens of the world. This simple project invites anyone to make a personal resolution in a private digital time capsule; a typed or video commitment to yourself to improve on just one thing for your “better normal.” On October 1st, 2021, your time capsule will find its way to your inbox. You’ll be able to see if you kept your promise to yourself, remember what you were thinking and feeling during this time, and why you resolved to do better in this one small way. Private and confidential, nobody but you will ever see or hear your time capsule. It’s a digital record for you alone.

A short film was also produced by Nova Film to provide a clear context for this positive initiative and to get as much exposure as possible by sharing on social media. An audio narrative supports the strong visual concept of the video, and clarifies the mechanics and the next action required by the audience.

Core features: The development of the time capsule itself, which records your resolution in a secure database that will be sent back to you on October 1st, 2021. We managed to focus the entire experience on that specific call-to-action, which brings people into the funnel of making an actual resolution (for themselves, or for others.)

Favorite details: It’s the first collaboration between Locomotive and Nova Film, which resulted in a well-delivered, positive initiative using both video and web to deliver a positive message to the world. We’re also quite proud to launch a campaign on our own without any commercial goals. No gimmicks or data collection. Only goodwill.

Challenges: Timing was the most important factor of this campaign. From beginning to end, this project took about four weeks to launch. We hoped to use this actual period of introspection and confinement to channel all the positive will of people that want to make changes in their lives into a personal challenge or resolution.

Time constraints: Because we had to quickly figure out the messaging and digital concept of this initiative, we also planned the execution of each piece of the campaign in the simplest form possible, which I’m sure has been beneficial to the final outcome and overall simplicity of this positive initiative.

Technology: The website has built with modern coding practices. It is fully responsive and uses basic HTML, CSS3 for styling, JavaScript for seamless feedback throughout the experience and GSAP for animations. We also implemented our proprietary, open-source software Charcoal as a PHP framework for the project, which is used as a CMS—in this specific case—to store all text-based or video resolutions in real time without giving any reading access or capabilities to the administrator of the platform.