Fiction. The clip does not exist. Neither does anyone in it.
The clip runs for either 41 seconds or 28, depending on which cut you saw. It shows a woman on a pavement outside a bakery on Vaughan Street, and a quantity of fruit, and something happening between the two. It has been watched a number of times that nobody quoted below agrees on. The following is assembled from separate interviews conducted over three weeks. None of the participants was in the room with any of the others.
I. Before
Kerry Bowman, the woman in the clip: I was walking to a coffee. That is genuinely the whole of it. I was walking to a coffee.
Marguerite Ash, publicist: There was no shoot that day. I want to be extremely clear about that, because it has been reported otherwise. There was nothing in the calendar.
Tom Fenner, photographer: I was booked ten days out. It’s in my accounts. The brief said “walk-and-talk, Vaughan Street, natural, 90 minutes, no lighting”. I invoiced for it. It got paid.
Marguerite Ash: Tom was in the area. Tom is often in the area. That is not the same as a booking.
Ellen Voight, brand manager, Sarne: The trainers were ours. That is not in dispute. The trainers were part of a four-week placement and that Tuesday was inside the window.
Kerry Bowman: They were my own trainers. I’d had them about two years.
Tom Fenner: Wardrobe changed her shoes twice before we started. I remember because we lost the light while it was happening.
Gordon Peale, retired, was there: I’d been to the market. I go Tuesdays. I had a net of satsumas, a loaf and two tins.
II. The forty seconds
Ellen Voight: It had been raining and it had just stopped, which is why the pavement looks the way it does. That surface is doing enormous work. You could not brief that surface.
Marguerite Ash: It was bright. It was a bright, cold day.
Gordon Peale: It was drizzling the whole time. I had a hood up. You can see the hood.
Kerry Bowman: I don’t remember the weather. I remember the bag going.
Tom Fenner: The bag went at about the eleven-second mark of my second card. Eleven oranges. I counted them afterwards off the footage because I got asked, and I counted eleven.
Gordon Peale: They were satsumas. There were nine. I know there were nine because I’d bought a dozen and eaten three on the bus.
Ellen Voight: The number was six. Six is the number in every version I have been shown internally, and six is the number in the deck.
Marguerite Ash: A full net. Twenty, maybe. It looked like a lot. The volume is part of why it worked.
Kerry Bowman: I knelt down.
Tom Fenner: She crouched. She didn’t kneel. If she’d knelt I’d have had to move, and I didn’t move, and my feet are in the same place on both cards.
Gordon Peale: She stopped. She sort of stopped and put a hand out and then somebody else came in from the left.
Marguerite Ash: There was nobody else. That’s the entire point of it. That’s why people responded to it.
Ellen Voight: There’s a dog at 0:19. The dog is the reason it travelled. I have said this in three separate meetings.
Tom Fenner: There was a dog earlier, tied outside the bakery, and it had gone by then. It’s not in the clip.
Gordon Peale: There was no dog.
Kerry Bowman: There might have been a dog.
Marguerite Ash: She said “oh no”. It’s audible. It’s the only audio in the whole thing and it’s the reason the audio was kept.
Kerry Bowman: I said something about the pavement. I don’t know what. I don’t think it was words exactly.
Tom Fenner: She said nothing. My audio is dead on that card, I was on a long lens across the road, there is no world in which anyone heard anything.
Ellen Voight: The audio was added. I’m not saying that as a criticism. It was added well.
III. Who was filming
Marguerite Ash: A passer-by. A young woman. We never found her, we never paid her, and we have never claimed the footage.
Tom Fenner: It’s my footage. It’s the second card. I know the frame, I know the wobble, I know exactly where my elbow was.
Ellen Voight: It came to us through an agency, cleared, with a licence. I have the licence. The licence names a rights holder and it is neither of the two people you have just mentioned to me.
Gordon Peale: There was a woman with a phone up before the bag went. That’s the bit nobody asks about. She was filming before there was anything to film.
Kerry Bowman: I didn’t know it was being filmed. That is the truthful answer and it is the answer that satisfies nobody.
IV. The next four days
Marguerite Ash: Day one it was nothing. Day two it moved. Day three we stopped answering, which is the correct call and I would make it again.
Ellen Voight: Day three we ran the placement early. We had it scheduled for the following month and we moved it. I have been asked whether that was opportunistic. It was our window, it was our product, and the product was already on her feet.
Tom Fenner: Day four somebody wrote that it was staged, and my name was in it, and my phone did a thing it had never done before.
Kerry Bowman: I was asked to talk about it fourteen times in six days. By about the fifth I had a version. By about the ninth the version was better than the thing.
Gordon Peale: Nobody rang me. A young lad from somewhere emailed and asked if I’d like to comment, and I said I would, and then he didn’t reply.
V. Now
Ellen Voight: It is in our internal case studies as an example of earned attention. I am comfortable with that description. Earned does not mean unplanned.
Marguerite Ash: If it had been staged, it would have been better. That’s my line on it and it has never failed.
Tom Fenner: I never got a credit. I got paid, which is different, and which people keep telling me is the same.
Kerry Bowman: I’ve told it so many times now that I watch it from the outside, like I’m the woman across the road. Which means I’m not in it any more. I don’t know when that happened.
Gordon Peale: I’ve seen it. I’m the elbow at the left, about halfway. People ask me how it felt. It felt like dropping shopping. I picked them up myself, after, and that part isn’t in it, and I’ve stopped mentioning it because it seems to annoy people.
