Philips
Carousel
Tribal DDB Amsterdam
‘We were asked to do an educational website about the television. And effectively that’s what Carousel is – it’s an educational website about a television done in a very cinematic way.’ As Chris Baylis, creative director at Tribal DDB Amsterdam suggests, the website that the agency created for the launch of the Philips cinema- proportioned 21:9 TV in 2009 is no ordinary educational site. It centres around a film directed by Adam Berg, which features a dramatic heist scene. Unlike the fast-cut, high-action style we might associate with the heist genre however, the Carousel film is still, as if the action has been frozen at the height of its intensity.
01-02 The Philips Carousel website featured a film showing a dramatic heist scene which appeared to have been paused at the peak of its action. The actors had to hold their complex positions on set for hours at a time in order to achieve the frozen effect.
The camera moves slowly around the scene, relishing every detail. Bullets are shown hanging in mid-air, while a policeman is caught blasting through a pane of glass, having been booted there by one of the thieves, all of whom are dressed in clown suits. The camera zooms up to the ceiling and onto a new floor, gliding through an explosion and tracking past a SWAT team in the middle of a fire fight with more clowns. The film then ends back where it started, revealing the twist in the tale along the way.
The piece works in two ways for Philips. It is an entertaining narrative, but also built into the site are ‘hot spots’ of information about the television. As viewers watch the film on the website, they are given the opportunity to pause and click to get this information. To keep the cinematic theme, all the info is presented as if it is from the perspective of the crew, and includes speeches from a fictional director, director of photography, and VFX supervisor. The impression is that you are being taken behind the scenes of the film itself, although the intention is really to impart messages about the TV.
The aim of the site was both to launch the TV, and to give the brand a distinctive tone within the crowded television market. Prior to Carousel, the only brand in this area with unusual advertising was Sony, who had distinguished its Bravia product as having outstanding colour through commercials including Balls and Paint (see pages 172 and 178). ‘Philips has always made really amazing TVs,’ says Baylis. ‘They win lots of technical awards – but they just hadn’t managed to tell the story very well. 21:9 gave us a bigger platform. In the way that Sony owned colour, Philips now owned cinema, which was an interesting territory for us to go and explore.’
‘Philips has always made really amazing TVs. They win lots of technical awards – but they just hadn’t managed to tell the story very well. 21:9 gave us a bigger platform. In the way that Sony owned colour, Philips now owned cinema, which was an interesting territory for us to go and explore.’
‘The original idea we had, which we talked to a lot of production companies about, was an idea of a big, looping tracking shot,’ he continues. ‘We thought tracking shots were cinematic and interesting, and we realized we could do a timeline-based website that you could jump off and on. So you can jump off the tracking shot, get a bit of education and then jump back in.’
Berg became involved after the agency saw a similar frozen-time-style film on his reel. ‘We started exploring that with them, and started exploring how it could best be used,’ says Baylis. ‘We said that we wanted big cinematic things like heists or sieges. As soon as you go into frozen time, it has to be something very immediate, so we had to have a story that could be understood in shorthand. The cops and robbers story is a classic cinematic story.’
‘A lot of people look at the film and think “Oh, it looks like Ronan, it looks like The Dark Knight, it’s so referential”,’ agrees Mark Pytlik of Stink Digital, an executive producer on the website. ‘It almost looks like it’s stealing from those things, and it kind of is, but it was done strategically to try and help locate it in film. You don’t see very many internet virals that feel like Hollywood thrillers, and that speak in the same language, so we had to do that to get into that world.’
The film was shot in Prague. ‘One of the biggest challenges of the job from a location perspective was finding a place where we could do this continuous scene,’ continues Pytlik. ‘That location gave us everything we were looking for. There was an outside bit where we could do the tracking, we could go in through the building, go up the stairs and then come back out again and make our loop. That was a huge challenge, just finding a place that would let us do that. Our main office for the shoot was in an old Stasi listening room. We had this massive room, with this huge rectangular table, and built into the table were all these microphone decks, where people would presumably listen in on phone conversations back in the day. Now it’s a college. Our art direction team in Prague converted it into a hospital in about 24 hours.’
‘We cast people who had really good core body strength,’ Pytlik continues. ‘People look at the film and think there is a massive amount of 3D work throughout the entire piece. Truth is, there was a ton of 3D work, but it’s mostly focused on the smoke, the explosions, the glass shards, the dollar bills.… But viewers think that the people who are actually frozen there are also 3D constructs and they’re not. We cast former gymnasts, stunt men – people who could literally hold a position for a long time. Sometimes for hours at a time. We shot the whole thing using motion control, and it’s very difficult sometimes to set up the motion control and get it right, so everybody would be waiting.’
A motion control rig allows a director to achieve the exact same camera move repeatedly, meaning that it’s possible to film complicated scenes with different amounts of detail – for example, with people and without – so that everything can be knitted together neatly in post-production. While essential to this shoot, using motion control did cause some extra difficulties for the crew. ‘It started raining on the first night and rain and motion control just do not go together, it’s a disaster,’ says Pytlik. ‘We only had two days, there was no provision for any extra days, and we were already running into overtime. We were looking at ways to rethink the entire thing, but the rain just miraculously died at about four in the morning on the first day, and we got our shots, and moved inside for the second day, where things got reasonably easier.’
Shooting the ‘hot spot’ segments, which give info on the TVs themselves, also created problems. ‘Due to a lot of complicated and convoluted reasons, we couldn’t shoot the behind-the-scenes stuff at the same time as the live-action stuff,’ explains Pytlik. ‘We shot it all at the end, which meant that we had to go back to the set, get everybody to stand in the exact same positions and match exactly what they were doing 12 hours previously. There’s no easier way to do that than to tediously set everything up and then check it against a monitor that shows what we’d already shot. We were pulling our hair out trying to match some of those shots on the second day.’
The hot spots play fast and loose with the realities of filmmaking in order to get across their messages about the TV in a simple fashion. The post-production segment, for example, makes a lengthy, painstaking job look surprisingly quick.
03 Storyboards for the Carousel film show how the action was planned.
04-08 The set allowed the director, Adam Berg, to film the narrative in one continuous scene. Many of the actors were suspended on wires, which were then removed in post-production.
‘Viewers think that the people who are actually frozen there are 3D constructs and they’re not. We cast former gymnasts, stunt men – people who could literally hold a position for a long time. Sometimes for hours at a time.’
09-15 Still images show how the frozen time effect appeared in the finished film.
16 The film was showcased on a website for Philips, which allowed visitors to pause the narrative to obtain more information about the Philips 21:9 television.
‘You don’t see very many internet virals that feel like Hollywood thrillers, and that speak in the same language.’
‘We’ve taken a lot of poetic licence,’ agrees Chris Baylis. ‘It’s a condensed reality really. Our director bears no resemblance to Adam Berg whatsoever. Adam Berg is a quiet, thoughtful guy and that director’s played as a loud American, they’re two completely different people. Our reasoning for having those people in it was about how this TV is made for cinema, and not just for cinema, for cinematographers. It’s made with filmmaking in mind, so taking it back to the source in that way was a nice part of the strategy.’
The interactive element of the site, where this information is contained, is subtle but vital to fully understanding the campaign. The film did prove successful on its own, however, and was admired for its technique. ‘The interactivity was fairly minimal, but it was really nicely applied,’ says Pytlik. ‘I think one of the things that gets lost sometimes is that people look at the film as an individual piece of content. There’s no end branding on it, there’s no mention of the TV, and I think when people think of the film outside the context of the site, you lose a little bit of what it’s doing for the brand. The reality is the site is the destination, and the film is the central piece of content that gets people there, but it’s all the stuff that’s happening around it that’s really doing a lot of the heavy lifting for the brand.’
The project was completed remarkably quickly – in under two months – meaning that the team working on it had little sense of what they had created while it was being made. To their pleasant surprise, it was an instant success – breaking the mould of what might be expected from an ‘educational website’. ‘We made it and then we realized what we had afterwards,’ says Baylis. ‘We were just meeting our deadline, making a website, making it as good as it could be, trying to make it cinematic… and we happened to end up with something amazing.’