When the audience is the cast: how 80 managers became the first part of the convention film

"Where three rest, one keeps the secret." Twenty pharmacy managers read this line on a card pulled from a shopping bag of their own chain, in the middle of Parque do Ingá, in Maringá. Nobody has a phone at hand. Nobody knows where the other sixty colleagues are. All they know is that they need to crack the clue, find the next one and reach a hidden object that will become part of a treasure. While they search, a camera follows every step. These managers have just become the cast of the film that would be shown at Farmácias São Paulo's annual convention.

Farmácias São Paulo: the Maringá chain that has cared for northern Paraná since 1951

Rede de Farmácias São Paulo was born in Maringá in 1951 and keeps its headquarters on Avenida Brasil, in the city center. According to its official website, it has more than 73 years of history, more than 48 stores and a presence in more than 12 cities in northern Paraná. The chain offers 24-hour service, delivery, corporate health plans, medication benefits and Clube FSP. The philosophy it declares fits in one line: "based on continuous growth and excellence in service".

The growth also shows up in the regional press. In September 2023, the chain opened its 43rd location, in Loanda, and had already opened six stores that year, according to Portal da Cidade. At the time, 26 of the locations were in Maringá. The annual convention exists for the people who work in these stores.

The employee convention brief: laughter, emotion and a silent mascot

I have worked with Farmácias São Paulo for a few years on its annual employee convention, the night when the chain rewards the best results, serves dinner and opens the dance floor. Each year the event gets a playful theme. In 2025, the theme was pirates, and this time I wrote alongside REC Mart.

The brief had very clear requests. The protagonist would be Paulinho, the chain's mascot, a character who does not speak and communicates with little signs. The budget was tight, with few days of shooting on location and no money for costumes or set design. And there was a sentence in all caps, the kind a scriptwriter reads twice: the audience needed to laugh and be deeply moved at the end.

The brief also raised a hard question. How do you give representation to the employees of a chain spread across so many cities without filming store by store? That question defined the shape of the whole project. The answer I found in the script was to put the managers inside the film, as the protagonists of the first part.

Treasure hunt team activity for a convention: 80 managers in Parque do Ingá

The project took on a three-part structure. The first, called The Managers' Mission, is a real, surprise treasure hunt in Parque do Ingá. Eighty managers were divided into four groups of twenty people. Each group received a card in an FSP bag, followed three clues with riddles and found a symbolic item: the Captain's Hat, the Lookout's Binoculars, the Bottle with the Map and the Compass of Truth. The second part is Paulinho's short film, pre-recorded, in which the mascot receives a chest with these four items and crosses the park on his way to the event. The third happens live, on the convention stage.

I wrote the mechanics of the entire team activity: the challenges, the clues, the treasures and the storytelling for the execution, the thread that explains to each group why it is there and what it carries. I took part in the location scouting visits and in preparing the staff team, because a treasure hunt only works when the people leading the groups know the story as well as the person who wrote it. The production script records that the groups would be led by Vanessa, from REC, and the schedule mentions "FSP and REC teams" working together.

The groups were kept apart from one another and without phones during the shoot. Each team lived its own adventure without knowing what the others were doing. Bringing the four paths together was saved for the edit and for convention night.

How to write treasure hunt clues based on the real locations

In the production version, the clues were rewritten from photos of each chosen spot, and each riddle began to speak to what the manager saw right in front of them. One Group D clue says: "The end is coming up behind you: go back and look behind." It only makes sense to someone standing in that exact spot, and this precision is what turns a stroll into a discovery.

A good clue is the length of a sentence read aloud by a group of twenty people, with a little mystery and an answer that appears in the landscape. When the group cracks it, someone points, everyone runs, and the camera gets a scene no actor could fake. The shoot took place over two days in September, in four windows of 40 to 50 minutes, one for each group.

In the edit, four groups become a single story

After the shoot, I wrote the video script with editing notes for humor, tension and emotion. The edit organized the first part by clue: the first clue of all four groups, then the second, then the third. This way the pace builds, and the audience feels that the four teams are advancing together toward the same treasure. The voice of the Pirate Oracle opens the sequence: "Four groups, four paths. Each team carries a part of the treasure. The adventure begins now."

This care with pacing owes a lot to the way REC Mart works. Ton Dijan and his team love scripts, follow the thread of the message and look for the image that says in seconds what the text took paragraphs to say. I am grateful for the trust with which they welcomed me into a project so dear to the chain.

In the script for the night, the chest reveals the word "PROPÓSITO" in gold letters, and the managers' compilation appears on the big screen. The audience sees itself on screen: the manager who cracked a clue in the park finds their own face in the company's film, next to colleagues from other cities. This is the power of participation at an employee convention: recognition comes through lived experience, and each person takes back to the store a story they were part of. The full account is in the Farmácias São Paulo section of the REC Mart case study, and the chain's day-to-day life appears on the official Farmácias São Paulo website.

In the next article about Farmácias São Paulo, I explain how a brief with a tight budget, no costumes and no set design became the film's humor, with a pedal boat, cardboard weapons and hand sanitizer on screen.