Commercials for video games are aimed at teenaged boys, so they tend to be loud and in-your-face. To be perfectly frank, the ads can be obnoxious. But that’s not so in the case of a new spot out of Leo Burnett USA, Chicago, for Nintendo’s GameCube, a home video game system that goes on sale in the U.S. on Nov. 18. If anything, this sophisticated, imaginative spot, titled "The Cube," is a cut above other ads in the category.
From the start, the creative team decided to aim high, according to John Brockenbrough, a senior VP/creative director, who acted as copywriter on the ad. "We were trying to be playful with the idea without dumbing it down for the audience," he explained. "Our feeling was that this was a huge launch for Nintendo, and we needed to do something that jumped out."
To achieve that goal, Leo Burnett turned to director Erick Ifergan of Serial Dreamer, West Hollywood, a satellite of bicoastal Believe Media. As for why Ifergan was the right director for the high-stakes job, Brockenbrough said, "We thought he had a dynamic visual sense and a good grasp of the surreal as well. This spot needed to have a surreal edge."
Packed with seamless visual effects, "The Cube" aims to show viewers how real and intense Nintendo’s GameCube makes video game play. Each segment of the spot centers on a cube, and the action within the cube represents a particular game that can be played on the system.
As the spot opens, we see two warriors—Mongolian fighters, according to Brockenbrough—facing off inside of a glass-encased cube placed inside what could be a busy, modern-day train station. Passersby stop to view the action. Another sequence depicts an elegant dinner party with a twist: A live man is literally squished into a cube placed on the center of the dinner table.
The spot also features a scene of a man mowing a beautiful green lawn on a sunny day. As he labors, he passes by a giant cube filled with water: It contains a jet skier riding waves. Other imagery in the spot includes a man watching a basketball player dribbling a ball at breakneck speed inside of a cube, and a Star Wars Tie Interceptor flying within a cube.
The spot ends with a young guy sitting on a bed inside of a cube, watching a video game go on all around him. It is as if he has literally stepped into this fantastic other world and is now part of it.
Leo Burnett had already received approval from Nintendo on the initial storyboards for the spot before Ifergan was hired. "Most of the original visuals stuck," noted Brockenbrough, "but each one evolved into something different with Erick’s help."
More specifically, Brockenbrough credited the director with bringing the initial scene of the fighters to an epic level the creatives originally hadn’t envisioned. Ifergan also made the dinner party scene a bit wilder. At first, the creatives had planned to make the cube on the dinner table larger and simply have a man seated inside, with the guy inserted during the post process. It was Ifergan’s idea to hire a contortionist and literally put him inside the cube, enabling him to shoot the guest in-camera, noted Brockenbrough.
Notably, Ifergan says it was important to him to create as many of the visual effects in-camera as he could. "The key to most of my work is I don’t do special effects with any one technique. I try to mix two or three techniques at the same time, and I try to do as much as I can in-camera. Whenever it is impossible to do it in-camera, that’s when we decide to do blue screen or to do Flame or to do CG," related the director. "The result of this is that it creates a look that is not common in terms of what you see in TV or the movies. It’s really a mixture, and you don’t really know how everything has been made."
The scenes of the fighters and the basketball player were among those in which Ifergan relied on old-fashioned, in-camera techniques. In the case of the basketball player scene, for example, he simply used wires to move the basketball around the cube. The wires were later digitally removed.
Other segments required more sophisticated techniques, so Ifergan and Leo Burnett turned to the staff of Paris-based postproduction/visual effects house BUF Compagnie for their expertise. The team at BUF utilized standard techniques to achieve many of the effects: There was quite a bit of CG and Flame work involved in the jet ski sequence, for example.
BUF also had proprietary software that made it possible to pull off the final scene, which featured the man enveloped by the video game footage. "It’s hard to describe, but their software allowed us to shift perspective [so we could] move the character around inside the cube rather than just statically cutting from one angle to another," Ifergan explained. "In the past, it’s always been sort of ‘insert game footage here,’ and I think that’s been the weakness of advertising in the video game category. What [BUF’s software] allowed us to do was to make the video game footage the hero but keep it organic to the concept."
The fact that Ifergan was able to so flawlessly and creatively incorporate the video game footage into the spot helped him land the job to begin with, noted Leo Burnett VP/executive producer Ron Nelken. "When we were looking at different directors and talking to them beforehand, he had made mention of this [BUF software] as a way to give a unique look to the video game footage within the cube itself," Nelken recalled. "He even went to BUF with some existing footage and showed us examples to give us an idea of how that stuff would look."
Nelken noted it is unusual for a director to go so far in terms of showing an agency what is possible before even landing a job. "Meanwhile, his treatment was an extended five-page, single-spaced document," Nelken added.
For his part, Ifergan said that he was so in awe of the quality of the concept Leo Burnett presented, he just had to do this job.
It was a laborious affair. In addition to shooting "The Cube," Ifergan directed an entire campaign of commercials for the Nintendo GameCube and various Nintendo games in just 16 days in Italy last August. "It was very intense," said Ifergan, who worked with DP Darius Khondji (whose film credits include Se7en, Evita and The Beach.)
"It took twenty-four hours of around the clock work," said Ifergan of the shoot for "The Cube." The post process took about a month. In order to get the job—which could have taken up to six months to finish—done so quickly and efficiently, Ifergan got every member of the team involved at the earliest possible stage. "We even had the editor start working early. As soon as we finished shooting the first or second day, the editor was starting to assemble stuff," Ifergan said.
Looking back on the job, Ifergan likens it to running an army. "A lot of people had to be ready to move as soon as the footage arrived because timing was a big issue."
