“You need to be a master of your environment, not a servant to it,” says Chase Armitage. “When I realized this, that’s when everything changed. That’s when I did my first slip.”
‘Slip’ is the new video ad for Xbox, from AKQA/London and Partizan that shows Armitage performing his parkour slip moves on the streets of London to promote three new Xbox games, which are shown at the end of the video.
“In all the games you have to control your environment, so we extended the idea and made the story about the guy who does extraordinary things,” said James Hilton, AKQA’s co-founder/creative director. “He bends space and dimensions when he slips in and out of his moves.”
Armitage, a noted parkour athlete and editor of www.3run.co.uk, a free-running site, jumps off buildings and hurls through the air in a series of slip moves, as he narrates the video to explain the master your environment philosophy.
The video was shot in the Southbank section of London, which features classic modernist architecture “that looks good on camera and is good to jump around,” said Matt Tucker, Partizan’s producer.
Tucker said the shoot was straight ahead–“he led us around and we pointed the camera at him,” but it was a little more complicated than that because four cameras were used for different effects. A small pinhole camera recorded close body shots. “We hadn’t seen it before, no one had put a camera on a person who’s running,” Tucker said. A small Swedish Iconix camera provided “a different kind of texture, for more grainy low file shots,” he said. A standard Sony 900 camera produced “straight shots that weren’t specific,” he said. And a Weiff camera was used for slow motion footage.
The result is a video that shows an exciting parkour performance that ends with a shot of the three new games on a wall that Armitage leaps over. It is becoming customary not to show products in broadband video advertising until the end of the spot. As Hilton noted, “It’s about engaging people in the story, so we didn’t want to show the box shots all the time. The game market is flooded with in-game footage and every game looks the same. We’re interested in engaging the consumer in the story and maintaining engagement until the end. It makes it far more interesting.”
‘Slip’ plays at www.xbox.com/master and at YouTube.
FCB Stays Atop The One Club’s Year-End Global Creative Rankings
FCB ended the year repeating its top positions in The One Club for Creativity’s Global Creative Rankings, with FCB New York again crowned Global Agency of the Year and FCB Global finishing as Agency Network of the Year for 2024.
The annual worldwide benchmark report is a comprehensive ranking of agencies, brands, countries, and individuals based on points earned from winning entries in The One Club’s eight global, regional, and local awards shows: The One Show 2024, ADC 103rd Annual Awards, Type Directors Club TDC70 competition, Art Directors Club of Europe ADCE Awards 2024, ONE Asia Creative Awards 2024, and The One Club Denver, San Diego, and Miami chapter 2024 awards programs.
“The Global Creative Rankings is the industry’s most comprehensive and transparent ranking,” said Kevin Swanepoel, CEO, The One Club. “There are no secret weightings in calculating the rankings, and unlike others, it’s not hidden behind a paywall. As the industry’s foremost nonprofit organization for the global creative community, The One Club is in a unique position to provide this free, definitive measure for global creative excellence to everyone in the industry.”
Highlights of the Global Creative Rankings 2024 are below.
Global Agency Rankings
FCB New York
Rethink Toronto
McCann New York
TBWAMedia Arts Lab Los Angeles
Serviceplan Germany Munich
Dentsu Inc. Tokyo
FCB Chicago
Marcel Paris
VML New York
Ogilvy PR New York, Publicis Conseil Paris (tie)
Independent Agency Rankings
Rethink Toronto
Serviceplan Germany Munich
Wieden+Kennedy Portland
Brand-Side Agency... Read More