Here’s a great new spoof on a memorable scene from Braveheart promoting Stongbow cider. Even day-workers need an inspirational speech every now and then…and this provides just that.
Produced by Benji Howell from Outsider, London along with St Luke’s, London. James Rouse was the Director for this piece with Julian Vizard, Alan Young, Enrique Reija, Borja Alvaraz and Tim Collins as the creatives.
Credits:
Agency: St Luke’s, London
Creatives: Julian Vizard, Alan Young, Enrique Reija, Borja Alvaraz, Tim Collins
Agency Producer: Jessie Middleton
Production Company: Outsider, London
Director: James Rouse
Producer: Benji Howell
DP: Alex Melman
Editing House:
Editor: Art Jones @ Work Post
Post-Production: MPC/London
Making a commercial for a video game is hard enough, imagine having to make a spot for a game that is based on both a recent blockbuster movie release as well as a continuation of a comic-book character…needless to say Toy NYC and MJZ had their work cut out for them when they were approached by Activision to create the promo for the upcoming X-Men Origins: Wolverine video game release. As you have probably already seen (or at least read about in trade pubs or on twitter), their combined efforts resulted in a killer POV (point of view) video that has us seeing life through the eyes of Wolverine as he escapes from a Mexican prison. Taking camera angles similar to the ones used in current video-games, this promo involved live-action footage as well as a large amount of post-production work in order to staple together :30 seconds of adrenaline rush.
The above clip is the ‘Making Of’ video that MJZ and Toy shot while working on the piece. By the way, I wasn’t kidding about the Mexican prison part, if you watch the video you’ll see that they filmed the opening ‘break-out’ scene at an actual Mexican prison! Very cool location indeed.
Intel has recently started running a new campaign in which it remakes the company’s top researchers into ‘rock stars.’ Well…. sort of at least. The man they show in the spot as Ajay Bhatt is really just an actor, however there IS a real Ajay Bhatt who, while working for IBM in the early 1990′s, played a key role in inventing USB (Universal Serial Bus). Intel had originally approached Ajay to ask for permission to feature him in their latest campaign, but according to Mr. Bhatt, he never really paid attention to what they were doing until he finally saw the completed promo on TV.
Intel said it hopes eventually to have its employees play themselves in its ads, but for the first round wanted actors with the comic timing, experience — and time — to play the part.
In the ad, mustachioed, elegantly coifed actor Sunil Narkar plays Bhatt, who is cleanshaven and has a spare hairstyle. And the commercial’s futuristic, glassy workplace looks nothing like Intel’s fabric cubicle farms in Washington County.
I thought that this was a clever campaign, though I would have rather liked the real Ajay Bhatt to star in it (shown in the above photo re-inacting one of the scenes from the spot). He’s hinted in recent interviews that he wasn’t too keen on becoming a ‘company pitchman,’ which may be the reason why he declined to make a cameo. I’m looking forward to seeing the rest of this campaign, it’s definitely an interesting way to try and connect the world-renound researchers with the Intel corporate branding.
San Francisco-based agency Venables Bell & Partners was responsible for this campaign. This spot alone has already received over 600,000 views in less than a week of being online.
