‘Movies’ and ‘Stay in touch’ are the first two spots in a series of commercials for PC World’s brand building campaign.  Directed by Olivier Gondry, the ads shift focus from products to brand identity featuring the strapline; ‘Whatever your world, PC World.’  The agency was M&C Saatchi and production was handled by Partizan, with MPC providing the post. 

‘Movies’ explores the story of a man and his passion for film, and how technology helps him fulfill this passion.  He describes his upbringing and his voice remains the same even as we slide through images of different people including himself as a young boy.  We see his friends and family in various costumes each underlining his fascination with the movies, reviving old classics and styles as well as a cameo from Christian Slater.  To achieve this; each of the characters was shot wearing their costume and MPC’s 2d team enhanced the shots by creating the background for each movie theme as well as the transition effects, burning film, smoke and starred skies.  The fighter plane and spacecraft were created in 3d using Maya.  

For ‘Stay in Touch’ lip-sync was the main challenge, as a guinea pig, a baby and Jimmi Hendrix take part in the family’s story.   The guinea pig was shot while chewing and then its lips were tweaked in 2d to match the words.  For Jimmi Hendrix and the baby MPC shot additional mouths to match the script and combine with the actual footage.

This is the first PC World campaign to advertise in cinemas, so all the job was done digitally and supplied as 2k dpx files.

Paul Harrison added the final grade to both jobs creating a unique look for each sequence.  The team used the Resolve digital grading suite which allowed constant to’ing and fro’ing on the files to re-apply the grade to the most recent work and to utilise the mattes function to help imbed specific work. 

The spots will be on air and cinemas from 1st June, 2009