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In-house produced generic gaming category ad for Verkkokauppa.com.
This was also made to test out the capabilities of our in-house production and its limits. We do not have all the equipment or the studios for filming, but we do have a skilled crew in our marketing department. Planning this was a bit chaotic during the COVID-19 because we had to make a lot of arrangements with props used in this film. One of the hardest props was the Playstation 5 that we had to loan from another employee and we couldn't get a single Xbox Series X for this. But we had a lot of retro consoles and we decided to use them.
I think this was the first filming I've actually made a proper concepting and storyboards because we had to think about how the flow goes between the scenes. In other projects, I've just filmed events or stationary scenes in which storyboards or concepts are not really that important. Overall we had to change over half of the ideas because we couldn't get the props we wanted, but I'm really happy especially with the scene filmed with a macro lens close to the keyboard. There was a lot of movement and the timing had to be just right. I think we took at least 20 takes from that scene until we got it just right. The actor's hand coming down to the mouse was really close to the lens so it was hard not to hit it and the window for timing was really small.
The futuristic gaming setup we built found its place from Helsinki stores IV-room in the attic. Originally we thought of having just black background and use a lot of cables to fill the background, but this location gave a lot cooler futuristic industrial vibe and we didn't need to carry too many extra cables with us. We only had rough ideas of how the setup should look, but we wanted to focus a lot on the lightning of the set with all these RGB lights. Our camera guy Teemu had taken a couple of larger RGB lights with him, but we end up using also a couple of mines because we wanted even more colors. We used Teemus larger ones behind the camera and we used mine to color the pipes seen behind the desk.
I edited multiple variations from this ad with a shorter YouTube 6s bumper plus I also made vertical and square versions. Because it's a generic gaming film, it won't get old until the next console generation and so it's not tied to any specific short campaign. This way we can produce more content and use it for a longer period of time.
Camera & grading: Teemu Riihelä
Actor: Satu Ripatti
Assistant: Arttu Pelgonen
