Just before the launch of Sony’s latest gaming product, PlayStation 2 (PS2), a great urban legend was being built up around its capabilities. Some went even so far as to say that PS2 was powerful enough to control a missile. Obviously such grandiose ideas were false, but PS2’s agency, TBWA/Chiat/Day, San Francisco, decided to play off the hype and create a spot illustrating what could be PlayStation’s future.
"PlayStation 9," named after the fictional ninth incarnation of PlayStation, is set in the year 2078. A futuristic urban landscape complete with mile-high skyscrapers, flying subways, outdoor elevators and passageways looms behind a young man dressed in space-age clothing. He gingerly handles a glass ball with the alphanumeric symbol "PS9" etched on its side. After careful examination, he splits the ball open, releasing a school of tiny bulbous spores that float out of the ball and into the boy’s nose. The viewer follows the spores’ journey through the nose until they burrow into the fleshy walls of the young man’s brain. The scene cuts to a close-up shot of the boy’s face, which has been transformed into a digitized head with the words "Mind Control" written on it, indicating that he has entered the world of PlayStation 9.
Backed by a dramatic, John Williams-type film score, a woman’s voice guides us through PlayStation 9’s features, including "electronic spores that tap straight into your adrenal gland," and "improved retinal scanning," as the protagonist begins his journey through several live-action video game sequences.
He first jumps off the top of a skyscraper and, upon landing, is confronted by a group of kung-fu fighters. Using his brain and eyes as a virtual joystick—illustrated here by a red digital orb surrounding his head—he effectively kicks his way out of the situation.
Graphic scans of the boy’s skull intercut the live-action shots as the next fast-action sequence unfolds. The boy finds himself in the presence of two men detonating a bomb that explodes, leaving him alone in a narrow alley. Almost immediately, two knights mounted on horses materialize from the ground, charging each other in a joust. The boy, standing squarely between the feuding men, escapes through a secret hatch in the ground that dumps him into an underwater environment.
In the blue-green water, he encounters a beautiful mermaid. When they move to embrace, she is transformed into a terrifyingly large octopus. The boy narrowly escapes, emerging from the water to find himself in a game that appears to be a cross between jai alai and a futuristic car race. A helmet appears on his head, and he tosses a jai alai ball against a building as the car he’s riding in zooms into a dark tunnel.
The music crescendos and we are brought back to the world in which we began, with the boy standing against the backdrop of a city skyline. As if awaking from a bizarre dream, he opens his eyes, and looks at the PS9 ball in his hand as if it is the most magical, powerful item he has ever held. The screen fades to black and the words "The beginning" appear on the screen in white type. A second later, the letters "PS2" are illuminated. It is the dramatic moment that the spot has been leading you up to.
"Obviously these kinds of jobs have so many associated challenges, but the most challenging aspect was making those last five seconds work," related TBWA/Chiat/Day, San Francisco, executive creative director Chuck McBride.
McBride led a creative team that consisted of associate creative director/art director Eric King, associate creative director/copywriter Scott Wild, art director Rob Smiley and copywriter Stephanie Crippen. Once they came up with the idea to envision a PlayStation of the future, visual effects house Method, Santa Monica, was brought in to help guide the process.
"We started working with Eric [King] and his team during the storyboard stages to help him design the shots, keeping in mind the effects down the line," explained Method director of visual effects Alex Frisch.
Finding the right helmer for the job proved harder than finding a visual effects house. McBride recalled, "It was a difficult project to get people to do in the beginning because it kind of had that daunting, holy-shit-how-do-I-create-the-future reality to it." But for director Erick Ifergan of Serial Dreamer, West Hollywood (the shop is Ifergan’s own creative studio backed by production support from bicoastal/international Believe Media), creating the future was the most compelling aspect. "It was difficult and exciting because when you have an idea like that, it’s left wide open," Ifergan related.
The agency chose Hong Kong as the backdrop for the live-action portions of the spot because as McBride noted, "It’s very diverse and you really get the sense that you’re somewhere different." Surprisingly, much of what you see in the spot was accomplished in camera during a five-day shoot.
The young man cast to play the boy was flown in from Australia two days before the shoot. "He’s from this really small town and he’s never acted before, so when he got to Hong Kong and saw it filled with a bunch of lunatics from L.A. and a French director—and the next thing he knew, he had to stand on top of the edge of a building and fight karate kung-fu and monsters underwater …" laughed Ifergan. "He probably still doesn’t know if it was real or a dream," the director concluded.
As soon as Ifergan wrapped up the shoot, the film was sent back to California for color correction and editing. Rock Paper Scissors, Los Angeles, editor Angus Wall explained that "every sequence in the commercial was given its own specific telecine treatment so that each step of the journey would have a different look." (Film to tape transfer was done by Jais Thierry Lamaire at 525 Studios, Santa Monica. Lamaire has since left to launch his own telecine shop in Santa Monica, called Bobine Video.)
In the meantime, McBride and his crew were trying to nail down the appropriate music for the commercial. The agency hired composer/sound designer Ren Klyce of Sausalito, Calif.-based Mit Out Sound/M.O.S. to create something grandiose. "We tried to pick something that felt like it had its own sense of drama so when you get to the end [of the spot] and it drops you off into blackness, it felt like ‘Wow, that sounded really important,’ " McBride related.
Wall, Frisch, Ifergan and the agency creatives collaborated heavily during the editing and visual effects process because they weren’t exactly sure how the commercial was going to evolve. "The innovation details were actually a little more extemporary than the way we storyboarded the pictures out," explained McBride. "We had the film that Erick did that we could link our story to. That was the spine. Then in cutting, we developed a repetitive nature. What was integral about Method was they were able to come in and create some transitional elements and then also do things to the content of the film that are hard to imagine being done."
Early on, Method had done a scan of the actor’s head so the visual effects house could recreate a 3-D version of it in Maya. The digital skull was later used as a transitional piece between each action sequence. To enhance the Hong Kong skyline, Method used a plate that was shot on location, then created a 2-D matte painting of the city. From there, Frisch’s team painted in numerous layers of futuristic landscape.
The only section Method didn’t work on was the anatomy sequence where the spores enter the boy’s nose. This job was contracted out to visual effects house Pixel Envy, Pacific Palisades, Calif., under the art direction of Frisch. "Pixel Envy had done a similar shot for a bit of a music video that we thought was pretty interesting, so we brought them in to help us on the project," Frisch explained.
"In post, we spent three weeks of conceptual noodling, trying this and trying that, putting on this layer, showing people, trying more and pushing it further. But I don’t think this thing was ever quite realized until Alex [Frisch] started bringing it to life by creating some of this more special effects animation. Because with that you started to realize, ‘Oh yeah, I am in the future now,’ " concluded McBride.
