Verizon’s video game-style ad takes you on a seemingly normal journey through a totally abnormal world. MPC teams, led by Alvin Cruz, David Piombino and Chris Bernier, worked in close collaboration with director Doug Liman of Independent Media and ad agency Madwell to show gamers the benefits of 5G by building a world rife with ominous and unsettling lag-induced glitches–before teasing a seamless 5G future ahead.
Verizon’s 5G Ultra Wideband will change connectivity as we know it—particularly when it comes to the world of gaming. In this spot, MPC transposes common gaming lags into real-life scenarios, and shows the potential of a better 5G experience on Verizon’s network.
MPC’s creative director Cruz talked about the immense scale of VFX within the film and the importance of capturing data on-set: “Having the synergy of Doug (Liman) and Hoyte (DP van Hoytema) on set was amazing; they dissected and directed the camera to move in exactly the same way as a video game. The combination of an extensive survey of the principal photography with the previsualization created a natural way to jump into the 250 CG assets build.”
The spot begins as we find ourselves dropped in a nondescript neighborhood in the early morning. The houses are nearly identical–it’s almost a little too perfect–and as we see people starting their days, we begin to get a strange feeling.
By coupling a familiar world with unnatural digital distortions, the type we see on our devices, the film shows glitches that gamers will instantly recognize. At the end of the spot, all our technical difficulties are resolved, and we get a taste of life as usual.
Madwell’s co-founder and chief creative officer Chris Sojka commented: “It’s never easy to create an alternative reality, but this spot required one. Our goal was to depict life in the style of the omniscient wandering camera you might experience in a video game, then completely and successively subvert it until everything was falling into pieces. Quite literally. We used cameras in ways you don’t, we did effects in ways you otherwise wouldn’t, all to complete the illusion of a universe slowly and steadily degrading, unable to find the power necessary to render its own reality. The result needed to be confounding and captivating. Between Doug’s vision and MPC’s tireless attention to detail we merged a broken video game into a broken “reality.”
Madwell’s creative director Ryan Howard added, “We knew from the start this was an ambitious project. We needed to run a safe shoot during a pandemic and complete post-production remotely, and despite those challenges we had to create something that felt extremely authentic to a varied and diverse audience of gamers.”
