Editors at Toronto’s Third Floor Editing spent four months slicing through 100,000 feet of footage to help come up with an ambitious one-of-a-kind worldwide spot for Ford.

‘I could have easily ended up in an institution, but I’m not,’ says Third Floor senior editor Barry McMann, who spent this past summer locked in an editing suite searching for the right scenes.

‘Out of 2,000 feet of film, 22 minutes of film, I may be using 16 frames. But those are the very best 16 frames of that,’ he says. ‘It’s about movement. Is the camera perfect?….Basically does this two-seconds of film express all the emotion that it possibly could?’

Third Floor did the offline for the spot while Toronto’s toybox took care of the final transfer and Inferno work.

A millennium piece two years in the making, ‘Global Anthem’ was the brainchild of Ted Powell, creative director at J. Walter Thompson in Detroit. The two-minute spot was shot across nine countries.

It is to air worldwide Nov. 1 at 9 p.m. local time, a strategy, ironically, known as a ‘roadblock’. It is believed to be the most wide-spread use of one commercial at one time by an advertiser.