Refuge
Optical Arts collaborated with BBH on a campaign for Refuge, a charity supporting domestic abuse victims. Our team created a campaign highlighting how abusers increasingly exploit technological advances.
Leveraging our expertise in live-action tech advertising and still-life film/photography, we took the agency's concept and script, developing the storyboard and assembling shots during pre-visualization. The film mimics high-end smartphone commercials, but with a disturbing twist, gradually revealing the dark potential of technology in the hands of an abuser.
Research & Development
We designed the devices for both the print campaign and the film, taking care to create original pieces of technology; we then worked on elevating the lighting and camera movements in CG, based on shooting live action references to compose the shots, creating an original and realistic technology campaign, using the appliances we created. We added small imperfections throughout the film in order to create an uncertain and unsettling atmosphere, slowly becoming more prominent as the film progresses.
To further differentiate the film from a tech ad the camera movement was disrupted, long pauses were added on single shots and stark lighting and colour was used. All these factors helped create an uncomfortable feel to the film, and draw attention to the danger of tech abuse.
Credits
Directed by: Fabrice Le Nezet & Dan Tobin Smith
Executive Producer & Producer: Hannah May
Lead CG Artist: Ben Cantor
CG Artists: Nicolas Damour, Leon Seith
2D Supervisor: Miguel Wratten
2D Artist: Ben Gallagher
Retouching: Martin Pryor
Edit: Matt Cronin
Phone screensaver content by: Joe Jackson
Live-Action Reference Photography: Elliott Lowe