The trip everyone talks about for years, and the one person who wasn’t on it.

Case study: Didn’t Go

The film

The film looks like a memory. Friends on a summer trip, cut the way a film cuts to a flashback: warm, a little overexposed, moving too fast to hold on to. [The scenes in your edit.] It’s the trip everyone talks about for years afterwards.

Then it cuts to a girl in bed at night, lit by her laptop, eating chips from the bag. A caption appears over her:

Croatian islands, 2025. Didn’t go. Prefer sandy beaches.

That’s the whole film. It makes no argument and shows no product, just the trip and the one person who wasn’t on it.

Getting the trip out of the chat

The app helps friends plan a trip together outside the group chat, which is where most group trips quietly stall. I chose not to show any of its features. Everyone has seen a split-screen of a calendar and a budget tracker, and nobody has ever booked a holiday because of one. The campaign shows what it costs when the plan never leaves the chat: you aren’t in the photos.

Every film in the series ends the same way, on someone who didn’t go, with a caption giving the place, the year and the reason. The reasons are deliberately small, [more captions]. They’re the kind of excuse you type into a group chat at midnight and forget about by morning.

Recognising the feeling

People rarely act on information. They act on a feeling they recognise in themselves, and the most useful thing a campaign can do is name one they already have but haven’t put into words. Here that feeling is the trip you didn’t take. This series started with an old music video, Groove Armada’s “My Friend” from 2001. In it, a woman goes through an ordinary working day, and her routine is cut against scenes from a holiday with her friends. I never forgot how that contrast worked: you don’t need to explain why the holiday mattered, because the grey day explains it for you. These films turn that structure around. The memories come first, and the cut lands on the person who has none of them.

The research behind the feeling is solid. The psychologists Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Medvec found that people regret their actions more in the short term but regret their inactions more over the long run. In one of their surveys, 45 of 60 people said the things they hadn’t done weighed on them more than the things they had. A later, much larger replication found the short-term half of that pattern clearly and the long-term half less strongly, so it’s a tendency, not a law. It’s also the one people recognise immediately. Fear of missing out, as Andrew Przybylski and his colleagues defined it in 2013, is “a pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent.” The girl with the laptop is both of those at once, a missed trip that’s still being looked at.

The captions do the rest of the work. They’re dry on purpose, because a viewer laughs at the excuse first and only then notices that they’ve used it.

Making it with AI

The films are AI-produced. The flashback sections had to feel like memory rather than footage: [grain, colour, frame rate, edit rhythm]. The last shot had the opposite job. It’s still, flatly lit and slightly too long, so the switch from one to the other does the storytelling.

Sources: Groove Armada, “My Friend” (2001) · Gilovich and Medvec, the temporal pattern of regret · the 2023 replication · Przybylski et al., fear of missing out

Companion essay: Load-bearing ideas · Next project: DEW →