Inspired by Dante’s Inferno, we took the viewer on a journey through the levels of modern hell.
Each level metaphorically addresses a topic omnipresent in today’s world. Such as the addiction to smartphones, genetically modified food, freedom of speech or surveillance. The viewer dives deep into a dark, dystopian world, not so very different from ours. But there’s light at the end of the tunnel – it’s the knowledge and well-founded opinion Falter can provide you with.
Creative Execution
The ad was brought to life in a dark and gritty black and white look. It was crafted with a combination of traditional and digital media, which allowed the necessary freedom in production and animation while keeping the roughness of analogue drawings. To make various ways of animation and different types of effect footage work in one single illustrative painted look, we developed a technical pipeline allowing full creative control both on the timing and animation side as well as art direction until the very end. Every background and every character was hand drawn and then brought into a 3D environment. Using Photoshop and some footage created in Cinema 4D, each scene was created as a single layered painted illustration, then deconstructed, animated and composed in After Effects. To allow a realistic jitter and light flicker, the lights on figures and objects were painted on several separate layers.
Indication of how successful the outcome was in the market
The campaign hit a nerve with the public. The topics of genetically modified food, deforestation and addiction to smartphones are a global issue - unfortunately. It has since been featured not only in trade publications, but has been shared by many readers of Falter as well as other journalists through social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter and Vimeo. Through that, the film alone gathered about 200.000 views. AND – it made people aware of a small, independent newspaper in Vienna, not afraid to talk about uncomfortable issues.
Since Falter is known for holding up the mirror to society, that’s exactly what we did in the film and the accompanying website. By creating a dystopian world, closely modelled to our own and untypically dark for advertising, we reached a hard-to-impress target audience of intellectual and culturally interested people all around Austria. To further boost the recognisability of the brand, we gave the key visual of Falter’s long running ‘Get me out of here!’ campaign, a red helping hand, a vital role.