It’s hard to think of computer chips as hip, hot, must-have commodities, but a new spot for Intel out of McCann Erickson, New York, actually puts you in that mindset. Directed by Vaughan Arnell, with visual effects by The Mill, London, a lively :30 titled “Creativity” entices you with a catchy tune you can’t get out of your head–“Ice Cream” by electronica band New Young Pony Club–and there are spectacular visuals of energetic young dancers who literally multiply.
By the end of the spot, a simple message has been shared: If you buy a computer equipped with the new Intel Core 2 Duo processor, you’ll be able to perform multiple functions simultaneously without slowing down.
The goal in making “Creativity” and two similarly executed spots, “Intensity” and “Productivity,” “is to seed the name of the new processor and the Intel brand in people’s minds in a very emotional way that is engaging and memorable,” according to McCann creative director/art director Sasha Shor, who conceptualized the campaign with creative director/copywriter Gail Barlow. (Barlow has since left the agency.) It was also crucial to devise a message that would resonate worldwide. “Intel is a global client, so this is a campaign that had to live in many different languages and in many different countries,” Shor said. “So the more engaging, entertaining, vibrant and energetic we could make it, the more it would appeal across not only different age groups but different cultures and different countries as well.”
Arnell was a late entry into the talent pool of directors vying for the high-profile assignment but quickly impressed the agency not only with his body of music videos and spot work but the QuickTime he sent of himself speaking through the treatment he wrote and “bringing us into this conceptual world that he had in his head,” Shor shared. It should be noted that Arnell, who recently signed with Blink, London, and Blink’s U.S. division Furlined, was represented by Pagan, London, when he won and completed the Intel project. “He’s a massively particular talent. He’s very detail minded into the minutiae,” commented McCann executive creative director Bill Oberlander. “Quite frankly, during the shoot, when the choreographer was working with the dancers, he was the only one who knew exactly how this whole thing was going to come together. He had to make sure there was a central hero shot and the moves following that would have to be different off to the left and off to the right so that this blooming effect could occur.”
Arnell and DP Steve Chivers shot the spots in five days at Pinewood Studios outside of London. The action was shot motion control, with no green screen, across a 180-degree arc on a massive set painted entirely in gloss black. “He’s a little more old school, and he’s very much a purist,” Shor said of Arnell. “He wanted to be able to in real time see which compositions were coming together in which way. The only way to do that was to physically have these people together in the space moving through this set so that we could then composite them into their specific actions.”
Arnell had an Avid on site so that everyone–including The Mill’s mono-monikered Barnsley, who served as Flame artist/VFX supervisor on the job–could get a preliminary sense of how the spots would come together.
Lively performance The director had his dancers play to the camera and truly express their personalities, Shor said. The technique certainly helps to pull viewers into the spot. So does the aforementioned “Ice Cream,” which starts with the lyrics, “I can give you what you want.” The music for all three spots was found before they were shot so that the director would know exactly what he was working with, Oberlander noted. Intel smartly agreed to McCann’s choice to seek new music by undiscovered artists. “The client was onboard with finding new bands not on the charts yet and leveraging the fact that they are as cutting edge and groundbreaking as the product is,” Shor remarked.
Given that the music featured in “Creativity” drove the spot, The Mill’s crews labored to match the animated movements of the graphics with the beat of the music.
Layered choreography Barnsley started the process, taking the motion control passes and layering the dancers on top of each other using Autodesk’s Flame in HD.
Under the direction of 3-D producer Miles Pettit, the Mill’s 3-D artisans created the digital backgrounds, lighting and reflections (making sure all of the animation synched to the beat of the music), modeled an entire set and created the technical textures that were projected onto that set, which were then composited using Flame. The Mill’s 3-D artist Andrew Cadey wrote complicated codes to animate the aforementioned textures as well as codes for the titles squares that pop in sync with the music.
“Creativity” and the other spots were edited at London’s Cut and Run by Leo King, who cut two :30 and :15 versions of each spot.
Tracking research gathered by the agency shows that the spots have resonated with the target, reported Oberlander, noting that the body of work is intended to reach “texperts and trendies.”
