“Stealth” wasn’t merely a commercial for the launch of Verizon’s Droid smartphone (manufactured by Motorola). “It was our D-Day,” said Mark Koelfgen, executive creative director of New York’s mcgarrybowen, the agency that created the epic spot, which was meant to resemble an invasion.
Director Rupert Sanders of MJZ, and VFX shop Asylum orchestrated the awe-inspiring invasion. Sanders said he sought to make the spot “feel like a movie trailer.”
Sanders won the job after sending mcgarrybowen a treatment that relied on the power of the written word. “He works unlike any other director I’ve worked with in that most treatments I get are a mash-up of images and references and links and words. I get entire books on things,” Koelfgen shared. “But Rupert is a purist, so what you get back is nothing but five paragraphs written in courier in Microsoft Word–not an image to be found.”
Koelfgen continued: “We took his treatment in to Verizon and read it, and they fell on the floor. They absolutely loved it. He told a great story.”
Sanders’ treatment plays out in vivid and suspenseful fashion on screen: As “Stealth” opens, we see a squadron of stealth fighter jets dropping pods toward the Earth. People all over the country–ranging from a guy at a payphone in the middle of the desert to a fisherman at sea–stare in bewilderment as the pods streak across the sky, eventually slamming into the ground.
A few curious folks actually see the foreign objects open, revealing their precious cargo–the Droid. “What in the world is that?” a rancher asks.
The question isn’t answered–the commercial simply cuts to a screen informing viewers that the drop date for this mysterious device is 11/06/09.
Why all the mystery?
“We wanted to appeal to people who are completely plugged into the smartphone universe,” Koelfgen explained, “and we figured once we got some love going with those people, it would spread out from there.”
Under fire Looking back on the making of “Stealth,” mcgarrybowen exec director of broadcast production Roseanne Horn was worried whether the job would get done in time, noting that the effects-intensive spot was greenlit by the client just before Labor Day and had to be on the air by early November. “Every day, I thought, ‘Oh my God, are we going to make it?’ ” she confessed, noting, “and I’ve been doing this for 33 years.”
She credited Asylum’s ability to work without handholding for making it possible to meet the deadline. “We would come in and make our comments, but for any of the real key work, they would show us a finished rendering and for the most part it was beautiful, and we made no changes,” Horn said. “So their creative sensibility was so good that it wasn’t a struggle.”
Asylum’s ability to hustle also helped. Asylum had about two weeks prior to the live-action shoot to start rendering stealth planes based on designs created by production designer Phil Messina. But everything else had to wait until editor Neil Smith of Spot Welders locked his cut, and once it was locked, the VFX crew had only three weeks to complete the job, which involved the creation of not only the stealth planes but also mountains and cityscapes as well as extensive sky replacement.
VFX supervisor Robert Moggach is proud of the small details. “You see heat trails coming off the planes and subtle reflections in the pilots’ helmets, and there are lens flares all done to feel somewhat organic and natural as opposed to really sci-fi,” he remarked.
One of the biggest challenges in producing the spot was designing the pods. “Obviously, we didn’t want it to look like we were dropping bombs onto the mainland U.S.A. So we created things that looked more like spacecraft, something Darth Vader might flee in,” Sanders said, pointing out, “Also, the way the people approached them inquisitively ruled out any sense of threat.”
The pods sitting in craters after crash landing on Earth were a combination of practical effects from Legacy Effects and CG via Asylum. Why not simply generate the pods entirely via CG? “These things were supposed to be coming from really high altitude and crashing into the desert, and there is just something more natural and visceral about them being on set and being banged around a little bit and being half buried in the Earth,” Moggach reasoned.
Look and listen There is a lot to look at in “Stealth,” but the spot also features what Sanders describes as “cinematic and brutal” sound design created by sound designer Brian Emrich of Trinitite Studios based on a temp sound effects track put together by Smith during the editing process.
Q Department composed a music track that was designed to heighten moments of suspense.
Koelfgen is thrilled everything came together so well in such a short time. When Verizon came to the agency, “They had a handset and a dream, and that was it. We actually conceived the name Droid and the identity of the phone and designed the packaging and everything around it.”
