Dot-com companies are springing up everywhere, and their television commercials are mobbing the airwaves. But has anyone truly explained what the "dot" in dot-com is—or what it does? In a new Sun Microsystems commercial from Lowe Lintas & Partners, San Francisco, the dot is more than a placeholder between a company’s name and its Web address suffix. The Dot is a huge, menacing black orb that lashes out at the corporate executives who refuse to comprehend its awesome power.
If that sounds like the setup of some overblown, futuristic movie, it should: "The Dot," a spot directed by Phil Joanou of bicoastal and Chicago-based Villains, takes the form of a trailer for a make-believe science fiction/action blockbuster. The spot has all the elements of a real movie trailer: ominous symphonic music, eerie tracking shots along darkened hallways, a dead-serious announcer—Don Morrow, the voiceover artist heard in the trailers of Titanic and Saving Private Ryan—who intones, "It has arrived." As the tension rises, so does the absurdity of the situation: terrified workers flee their cubicles, and the mailroom is the site of otherwordly chaos, with papers and envelopes twirling in midair. Over the sound of an alarm, one panicked man yells, "We’ve got to update the server—it’s our only hope!" Upstairs in the boardroom, company directors come face to face with the mad-as-heck entity—The Dot. After crashing through the boardroom table, it explodes in a flash of white light. The voiceover continues, "Sun Microsystems presents The Dot—your competition will never know what hit them!" The tagline: "Sun Microsystems: We’re the dot in dot-com."
When "The Dot" debuted during the March 26 Academy Awards broadcast, it was so convincing that several people involved in the production heard from friends who believed they’d either seen the movie, or wished they had. The Sun Microsystems campaign may have viewers believing in a slate of new "movies": the :30 is the second in a series of five. The first, "Critical Decision," appeared to be touting a thriller that might be described as The Firm meets Wall Street. There’s also "Huge," a made-up family movie about a little girl with big responsibilities, and "Mr. D," a mock trailer for an offbeat indie flick about a smooth operator who solves corporate dilemmas.
"You know the joke about how every agency creative has a half-finished screenplay in a drawer?" asked Jae Goodman, copywriter/associate creative director at Lowe Lintas & Partners, who worked on all five spots. "This was a great way to bust them out and make some mini-movies. ‘The Dot’ begins as a scary movie, but at the end you’ve got this thing that looks like a big bowling ball tearing up the room, so it ends up being pretty funny."
There was another reason to choose it as a storytelling device: "Something like eighty percent of the hot dot-com companies run on Sun Microsystems, so we wanted to show that Sun is a behind-the-scenes power broker," said Goodman.
Michael Furlong, executive vice president/creative director at Lowe Lintas & Partners, said that the agency sought a director and cinematographer who could make the spots look like real feature films. DP Jeff Cronenweth’s most recent credit was Fight Club. Joanou, whose films included State of Grace and the U2 documentary Rattle and Hum, is known primarily as a director of dramatic films and music videos. Though he directed a few spots in the early ’90s through now defunct O Pictures, he abandoned spotmaking after a "bad experience," and concentrated only on features. However, a meeting with Villains founder/executive producer Robin Benson convinced him to return. "The reason I wanted to do this job was that it allowed me to work on commercials in a cinematic way," he said. "I got to do the highlight reel of some really fun movies. I had so much fun working with each genre—there are so many signature images you can play with"
"The Dot" also allowed him to pay tribute to his mentor, Steven Spielberg, who hired Joanou out of film school in ’84 to direct episodes of the television series Amazing Stories. In "The Dot," a young woman runs toward the camera and screams, "What’s happening?"—a moment Joanou gleefully admitted was "ripped off verbatim from Poltergeist—in fact, it’s the last shot in the Poltergeist trailer." "The Dot" also evokes Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Aliens.
The effects work that brought "The Dot" to life had to be highly original. Filmed on location at the Gas Company building, a downtown Los Angeles edifice with floors of raw space, the spot required "lots and lots of art direction and set dressing," Benson said. "We had to bring in a lot of office equipment to fill the sets." The 15 or so effects shots—including billowing clouds, a blue electrical current zipping along cables, and the fiery Dot—were created at Santa Monica effects house Gray Matter FX. Visual effects supervisor Gray Marshall achieved the mailroom-in-chaos effect by hanging 15 pieces of mail from monofilament and filming them against a greenscreen under changing light. The items were then composited by Gray Matter Flame artist Nancy Hyland; the final shot contained 24 layers.
The Dot’s spectacular entrance was even more complicated: the boardroom table was made of balsa wood, and a practical effects team used an air cannon to fire debris through it. The orb was created using Maya, and composited using Flame. "The whole spot lived and died on how the Dot looked," said Marshall. "The sphere is supposed to be a monolithic, solid presence that emits a blast of energy—the script described it as looking like the rings of Saturn. When you see this kind of effect in a film, you know they had months to get it right. We had a couple of weeks."
