Believe ("Diorama")
Microsoft Xbox 360 (Halo 3)2007
Believe ("Diorama") is a 2007 90-second television and cinema commercial (also cut to 60, 30 and 15 seconds) for Microsoft Xbox 360, created by McCann Worldgroup San Francisco and T.A.G.
The line
Believe.
Why it works
No gameplay, no graphics, no product shots. A slow camera drifts across a frozen battlefield, a hand-built museum diorama of exhausted soldiers, alien attackers and a ruined city, while a Chopin prelude plays. The film was the centrepiece of "Believe", the launch campaign for Halo 3, which treated a video-game hero the way societies commemorate real war heroes, complete with a fictional Museum of Humanity and testimonial films in which aged "veterans" remember fighting beside Master Chief. Its makers wanted to win over people who had never played Halo, so they sold story, duty and sacrifice instead of features. The diorama was real: roughly 40 by 20 feet, built in about four weeks by New Deal Studios with figures from Stan Winston's studio, and shot by Rupert Sanders. It is studied as the moment game marketing borrowed the gravitas of war cinema. It shared the 2008 Cannes Lions Film Grand Prix with Cadbury's "Gorilla", took the Integrated Grand Prix and won a One Show Gold Pencil.
Techniques
Sources · 4
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