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.
Director Hans Emanuel Joins Caviar For Commercials and Music Videos
Production company Caviar has signed director Hans Emanuel for U.S. commercial and music video representation. The film and advertising director fuses his keen--and Berlinale Film Festival Award-winning--eye for cinematic storytelling with a commercial background across multiple genres including beauty, automotive, dance, and visual effects-heavy projects, to produce creative for clients like Kia, Nivea, Nissan, L’Oreal, BMW and more.
Caviar executive producer Salim El Arja noted, “Hans has a unique ability to blend stunning visuals with heart and humor, rooted in his confidence as a craftsman. This allows him to focus on drawing exceptional performances from actors--including celebrities--and crafting films that are not only visually striking but also deeply engaging and often hilariously comedic. His sensibilities align perfectly with Caviar’s vision, and we’re excited to collaborate with him on work that pushes creative boundaries.”
Emanuel added, “Caviar is a renowned name, certainly since I began my career. They have a solid reputation for quality work, and I’ve always respected them as a company. Life is about where destiny makes you flow with the people you need; thanks to a series of projects, I was introduced to Florence Jacob with Caviar Paris first, and the rest is history. I feel they can support my career growth with their comedic expertise and filmmaking prowess.”
Prior to joining Caviar, Emanuel had been repped by production house Stadium. He was born and raised in Santa Monica, Calif., to a Mexican-German mother, benefiting from a culturally diversified upbringing that carried through his education interests. Knowing he wanted to be a filmmaker from the start, he began his career in the luxury and beauty field,... Read More