Commercials, film, animation, VR and TV

Our role

Nike set out to make an online advertising campaign for Nike Women, Be Transformed, featuring women whose exercise takes on extra power with the aid of animation.

It was distributed throughout Asia Pacific in cinema, TV, digital (mobile and website), print, out-of-home and in-store.

Challenge

The intention was to make four different 30s spots, using four different animation techniques, transforming the main character from live action footage to an animated version of herself. We were assigned, by the New York based agency Curious Pictures,

to make the spot “jump rope” which features animation and characters made in 3D.

We got a rough storyboard and outline of the plot from Curious Pictures.

Mel Lozano, who is the main character of our spot, was going to be rope skipping

in a basement environment when the ground suddenly starts to crack up,

and reveals a layer of burning lava underneath.

As evil hands reach up through the ground and try to drag her down,

she transforms into an animated version of herself and uses the jump rope

as a whip, to break out through the sealing and her freedom.

Solution

We immediately started working on a 3d version of Mel Lozano (who by the way is an Ultimate Frisbee player) and we went through several different versions and styles, simultaneously working on making realistic lava, and animatics to get a feel for the timing of the spot.

When we started piecing everything together, it just didn’t feel right. It felt to dark, dangerous and negative. We wanted the feeling to be uplifting, exciting and positive, so we threw everything out and started over from scratch.

After tons of animatics, character designs and brainstorming we came up with the concept of “funk city”, and the New York based director Rohitash Rao, loved it so much that he instantly flew to Sweden to join us in the finalizing of the spot.

Everything had changed, and the main character had gone from being a realistic-looking version of Mel Lozano, to basically being a cube with legs and arms, jumping around on crazy-looking hairy houses. But everybody was very happy in the end, in funk city!

Our role

We were contracted by the international bestselling author James Patterson to create a commercial for the release of his new novel Witch and Wizard

"The Gift".

The previous book in the series spent five weeks on first place in the New York Times bestseller list and James Patterson books has together sold over 220 million books worldwide, so we knew this one would get some attention.

Together with director Leopoldo Gaut from James Patterssons production-company

we created a storyline and a visual look that would capture the essence of the book´s magical world.

Challenge

Since "The Gift" is the second book in the very popular Witch and Wizard series one of the main challenges was to transfer the look and feel of the books universe to film.

Early on it was decided to use actors against a backdrop of a highly stylized version of a high security prison of the future. To not upset the books huge fan base it was also necessary to find the exact right actors to portray the siblings Witch and Wizard.

The storyline was developed into a 30s second commercial that could be cut down to a 15s version.

Solution

After sorting through a staggering 221 different actors the casting process narrowed down the choices to a handful for each part.

Casting videos were made and sent directly to James Patterson who decided who he though best reassembled the books characters. At the same time the art director Klaus Lyngeled was working on the concept art for the commercial.

He vaguely recalled seeing a magnificent old building on his last trip to Berlin that proved to be an old WW2 anti-aircraft-artillery-tower. The style of this concrete giant inspired the design of the futuristic prison.

And after 3 weeks work on concept art and casting, the look and choice

of actors was finally ready.

The commercial was shot on our in-house soundstage in Gothenburg and all post-production was done during 4 intense weeks by our visual fx-team.

The commercial aired on national TV across the USA during 2010-2011.

The book climbed the bestseller-lists and has now sold millions of

copies worldwide, safely securing James Patterson's place among the bestselling

authors in the world.

Our role

After the commercial success of our Be2 project we were asked to develop a concept for another dating-site. This time for a site that has a more casual approach to dating. C-Date may not be the site where you find your true love, but were you hopefully will have a great time while you looking for it.

Challange

The challenge was to make the commercial feel classy but with a little tease of a more explicit meeting. C-date is targeted mostly towards women and from the start we knew we had to deliver something that looked more like a sensual perfume ad, than the ordinary dating-site commercial.

A lot of ideas was tried out and discarded until we came up with the idea that was finally chosen. Our initial plan was to end the commercial without any voiceover or tagline, just the web-adress in a very small font. We thought that the viewers would not really get what the hell the commercial was for and log on to the site by sheer curiosity.

But since casual dating-sites at the time were getting a lot of bad media attention that idea was unfortunately dropped in the end.

Solution

To give the film its expensive look it was shot at an exclusive art museum in Gothenburg. We hired the whole museum for a day and shoot the commercial with paintings by Rembrandt, Van Gogh and Picasso just out of frame. Sweden is indeed a great country for filmmakers.

The final commercial has aired in 11 countries around Europe and made C-Date one of the biggest casual dating sites.

Directed by Björn Fävremark and John Boisen

Our role

Once again we were contacted by the international dating site Be2. They wanted to follow up the success of the Be2 - “heart to heart” campaign we produced for them last year with a brand new TV commercial. We gladly accepted the challenge and immediately started work on concept and ideas.

Challenge

Since Be2 has over 27 million members and local sites in over 30 countries, finding the key to make the commercial work on a global level was the first priority. This time they also wanted to target specific age-groups, so we decided that the best solution was to make three different commercials, one for each age-group, but with the same theme.

We wanted somehow to capture the feeling of your first, perfect kiss. The butterflies in your stomach, the ground shaking under your feet and the world turning upside-down. We thought that this would be a cool thing to try to visualize. What would all those feelings look like from the outside? Well, this turned out to be a challenge!

We made a quick mockup video with some simple concept-work to get the right feeling, and then we called in ballistics expert David Peter and started to blow things up!

Getting the right look and feel of the explosions was the first challenge, we did not want it to look like a warzone, but it still had to feel explosive and exciting, so we spent a lot of time trying out different techniques, cameras and explosive devices. Many of our friends spent hours in the Gothenburg rain, pretending to be in love and kissing in front of our test rigs, so we could come up with just the right mix of explosion and love.

Solution

Using practical effects is always a challenge so we had to do a lot of testing to get all the elements to work together...

But that became a good excuse to torture our intern Patrik with the air-cannon to see that everything synched.

The casting process on this commercial was immense, and we went through over 250 people to find three couples that made a perfect match. The final film was shot during three hectic days on location in Gothenburg, with a few separate days for explosion-plates and effectwork.

In the end it all resulted in four unique TV-spots, airing in 10 different countries around Europe and Australia.

A film made for the United Nations program to stop conflict diamonds from warzones being sold to finance conflicts and oppression.