After Sony lowered the price for its PlayStation Portable Media Player early this year, TBWAChiatDay, Los Angeles developed the “Get Your Own” campaign, which focused on a guy who doesn’t have a PSP and gets overly excited whenever he sees one. “It speaks about the mind set, when you have it and people see it, they get addicted to it and stare at the screen,” said Nick Davidge, a creative director at the agency.
The campaign’s first iteration took place on an airplane and the second, which launches next week, is set in a shopping mall, where three spots were shot, including one on an escalator that plays online. After the gameboy riding down the escalator sees a guy with a PSP riding up, he tries to walk up and badgers the guy about how great the PSP is. When the guy tells him he can’t use it, the gameboy ascends down the escalator and the “Dude, get your own” tag line plays.
The escalator spot works well online, because three different versions of it were created for three online placements. A 15-second spot runs as a pre-roll; a :30 runs as a banner that’s initiated by a user; and a :42 runs on the PSP website and YouTube and as banners on sites that allow long-form spots. “It works in different time slots and the gag changes where you can cut it,” Davidge said.
Director Sam Cadman, from Tool of North America/Santa Monica, Calif., said the location and the casting were two keys for the spot. It was shot in the Del Amo Shopping Center in Torrance, Calif., where Quentin Tarantino shot Jackie Brown. “So we were on hallowed ground,” he said.
The spot stars B.J. Bales, who appeared in the first campaign as the gameboy. “He’s a funny, spontaneous actor who brought the part to life,” Cadman related. “He was able to play the part even though he got beaten up, running against the flow of the escalator after throwing himself at the elevator doors for the TV spot.”
He runs into a fat guy on his way up the escalator. “We wanted him to barrel past other members of the public and we thought it would be funny if there was a really big guy,” Cadman said. “He’s taken out of the frame when he crashes into the guy with the enormous chest. But it felt natural and easy, because B.J.’s a star and he got it quickly.”
After B.J. gets rejected, he’s near the top of the escalator and begins riding down. “We wanted to make the situation visually funny, so it was best that he was going up at the end so when he gets left behind, he’s going down into the gloomy depths,” Cadman said.
The spot was shot in 35mm by a cameraman carrying a heavy camera with a rig attachment. “It required agility as he was facing backwards and had to step off without falling over,” Cadman said. “He’s standing in front of the PlayStation player who’s going up the escalator with his back to the direction he’s going in, and then he has to step back off the escalator.” It sounds almost as funny as the gameboy scene, but it’s not part of the spot.
Davidge said the spot will play on www.us.playstation.com, MySpace, GrindTV, Heavy, MTV and game sites, including IGN, Gamespot and Cravegames.
Several Movies To Look Forward To At Sundance 2025
The Sundance Film Festival catalogue can be overwhelming to navigate, with around 90 feature films playing across 11 days.
This year the Robert Redford-founded independent film festival has something for everyone: Comedies, dramas, horrors, documentaries, the intriguingly undefinable (there's a movie about cabbage smuggling called "Bubble & Squeak" and one in which a woman becomes a chair and everyone likes her better that way called "By Design").
Here are a few of the films we're looking forward to most:
"Atropia"
This is a film that the producers would rather audiences experience blind, but the brief synopsis is that Alia Shawkat plays an aspiring actress in a military role-playing facility who falls for a soldier playing an insurgent. Luca Guadagnino produced the film, written and directed by Hailey Gates. It also stars Callum Turner and Chloë Sevigny. When asked how she likes to describe the film, Gates told The Associated Press that, "Sometimes I describe it as a military industrial complex romantic comedy."
"Bunnylovr"
This film delves into the life of a Chinese-American "cam girl," kind of a virtual sex worker, who is navigating a toxic relationship with a client while attempting to repair her relationship with her dying father. Katarina Zhu wrote, directed and stars in the film, alongside Rachel Sennott.
"2000 Meters to Andriivka"
Pulitzer Prize-winner Mstyslav Chernov took audiences into the first days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in the Oscar-winning "20 Days in Mariupol" and is back with another dispatch from the ongoing war. In "2000 Meters to Andriivka," a joint production between the AP and Frontline, Chernov turns his lens to Ukrainian... Read More