The increasing sophistication of mobile devices demands increasingly sophisticated advertising, yet the Palm Treo 680 smartphone is also easy to use. So AKQA/San Francisco and Nakd/Toronto, the agency and production company, created a video ad that demonstrates the features of the Treo in an amusing way that makes the sophisticated device seem like barrels of fun.
The video, which can be seen at www.ontreo.com, starts with an array of pedestrians walking on a Los Angeles street corner. But as the sequence repeats itself, the scene changes in a number of ways to illuminate the Treo’s features, which are associated with partner Internet brands that can be accessed with the Treo. Suddenly, the pedestrians on the street are dancing, which promotes Pocket Tunes, which Treo users can access to listen to music. Later the street corner becomes a dynamic movie set, with a dinosaur, UFO and biplane, the pedestrians dressed as cowboys and space men, which promotes Fandango, a ticket buying service. Then the street becomes an international setting, with the Pyramids, the Kremlin and the Roman Coliseum, which promotes the Orbitz travel service.
Viewers of the video can click an orange tab that stops the action at any point so they can see the partner sites on the Treo at the bottom of the screen. “You can scroll through the services and see the scene change in front of you,” said Rei Inamoto, AKQA’s global creative director.
Producing the video was difficult because there were 30 characters in the scene and each one had to be shot separately for the changing scenes.
“We rotoscoped them and cut them out of the background and recompositioned them back into the scene one by one, so the transition is seamless,” Inamoto said.
Chris Bahry, creative director at Nakd, said another challenge was to generate the animated and 3D elements that demonstrated the partner features, everything from yellow heads for the characters to bubbles floating over their heads to the CGI elements for the Fandango and other scenes. “We had entire background changes,” he said. “For the Google maps sequence, the street was replaced by glassy white surface arrow icons. For Orbitz we changed the street corner elements to exotic destinations from all over the world.”
The end result was nine :10 loops for each of the applications, with four transitions each (forward and backward at the three and seven second marks) for a total of 45 video layers in the final Flash website. The transitions created one looping video, avoiding the need for hard cuts or obvious transitions, Bahry said.
The video was shot on a Los Angeles street corner, not a stage and there was no green screen for the corner. “There was no easy way to extract them from the footage so we had to rotoscope,” Bahry said.
Lighting was also a problem during the one day shoot. “We had to even out the lighting to make it as consistent as possible, so we had to make corrections to lighting changes and shadows based on time of day,” he said.
As difficult as the video was to make, viewing it is a true delight, the rapidly changing scenes startling. The small Palm smartphone takes users around the world, even if they’re standing on a street corner, and so does the broadband video ad from AKQA and Nakd.
Supreme Court Allows Multibillion-Dollar Class Action Lawsuit To Proceed Against Meta
The Supreme Court is allowing a multibillion-dollar class action investors' lawsuit to proceed against Facebook parent Meta, stemming from the privacy scandal involving the Cambridge Analytica political consulting firm.
The justices heard arguments in November in Meta's bid to shut down the lawsuit. On Friday, they decided that they were wrong to take up the case in the first place.
The high court dismissed the company's appeal, leaving in place an appellate ruling allowing the case to go forward.
Investors allege that Meta did not fully disclose the risks that Facebook users' personal information would be misused by Cambridge Analytica, a firm that supported Donald Trump 's first successful Republican presidential campaign in 2016.
Inadequacy of the disclosures led to two significant price drops in the price of the company's shares in 2018, after the public learned about the extent of the privacy scandal, the investors say.
Meta spokesman Andy Stone said the company was disappointed by the court's action. "The plaintiff's claims are baseless and we will continue to defend ourselves as this case is considered by the District Court," Stone said in an emailed statement.
Meta already has paid a $5.1 billion fine and reached a $725 million privacy settlement with users.
Cambridge Analytica had ties to Trump political strategist Steve Bannon. It had paid a Facebook app developer for access to the personal information of about 87 million Facebook users. That data was then used to target U.S. voters during the 2016 campaign.
The lawsuit is one of two high court cases involving class-action lawsuits against tech companies. The justices also are wrestling with whether to shut down a class action against Nvidia.... Read More