How does a reenactment of a battle from the War of 1812 become a video ad for the Nokia Nseries N95 phone? When the soldiers use the GPS feature of the phone to find the period coordinates from the battle so they know exactly where it took place and can reenact it correctly.
Reenacting the War of 1812, a two-minute video ad for the Nokia N95 phone, created by R/GA/New York and produced by Hungry Man/bicoastal, starts with a shot of soldiers in the field before Mark Hilliard, leader of the 1812 reenactors group, explains how the group is using the Nokia phone. More shots of soldiers in the field follow before the group is shown on a city street in front of a laundromat, “the exact spot where the landing party of the USS Farb was found, dead to a man.”
“We wanted to show a more human side to the device,” said Taras Wayner, executive creative director at R/GA. “The phone has a variety of different applications you can download and it’s open to do whatever you want to do with it.”
The video plays at www.nseries.com/open, YouTube and other viral sites. It also plays in rich media ads at Gizmodo, Engadget and Wired, Wayner said. The videos are featured in a campaign that started last fall that also features print and outdoor ads, but no TV. “They liked the video so much that they implemented it on the phone, so you can watch it after you buy it,” he said.
The film was shot in Brooklyn, the field shots in Prospect Park and the city shots in the surrounding neighborhood. Director Amy Nicholson of Hungry Man said the film is a mockumentary that was cast with a group of real reenactors from Boston. “They actually marched and fired muskets. It wasn’t in the original script but we got permission from the Parks Department to fire guns in the park,” she said.
She shot the film with a Panasonic HPX2000 camera in slow motion. “We used back lit gun smoke and slow motion running. We wanted to take them very seriously, but it adds to the humor,” she said.
The video is part of the Open campaign for the Nokia Nseries phones. “It’s all based on the idea that the Nokia platform is open to download,” Wayner said. “It’s not a closed system so you can put any application you want on it and don’t have to go through a third party.” This proved to be ideal for the War of 1812 reenactors.
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