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On 9 April, 2019 a new 360o action commercial by PocketBook launched on YouTube. The producer of e-readers revived well-known book heroes by combining classic literature with the latest technologies. The spectator will become a part of a big grotesque battle of good against evil while fleeing from Dracula’s teeth with Sherlock Holmes.
It was not enough for PocketBook to make a brand-film about e-reading but instead a real action movie, mixing epochs, formats, and genres. More than 50 team members, 2 built locations, 18 shooting hours, 3 professional stuntmen and 7 actors. All of this resulted in the “Inside your PocketBook” 360o commercial.
The viewer can watch what is happening from different angles, following the main character with the help of a computer mouse, finger gestures or smartphone movements. Those with VR glasses will be able to get even closer to the action with the heroes at arm's length.
Millions of stories inside your Pocketbook
An e-book reader is not just a gadget, but millions of stories that are always with you. That’s why, the new video is not just a commercial, but a real adventure, which brings together bright book villains: Professor Moriarty, Dracula, the Headless Horseman, Behemoth the Cat, Snow Queen, and Stromboli.
“We had been joking that something will definitely go wrong on the site because it’s too dangerous to gather so many villains in one place. But eventually we had nothing to laugh about: the
Headless Horseman could hardly see anything and was crashing the decor with the sword, the balloons were bursting at just one touch, and the fall of the crane weighing more than 150 kg became the icing on the cake,” says Natalia Khomenko-Koehler, Creative Manager at PocketBook.
An unprecedented level of detail for 360o
The team set itself ambitious goals with the quality of the picture, so it was decided to abandon the 360o cameras in favour of traditional ones. The cameras were mounted on a special platform designed for this shooting, to achieve maximum accuracy and frame width. All of this made it possible to shoot a video with a resolution of 6K, which was compressed to 4K for YouTube. As a result, the crew achieved exceptional detail, higher quality colour reproduction and the absence of so-called "stitches" in the image.
The shooting, conducted without a green screen, occurred in several locations designed for the project. Each scene of the fight was filmed in one shot, thus only experienced actors and stuntmen were selected for the roles.
“The idea of the 360o video came by itself because each fiction book is in some sense an augmented reality, it’s just a question of our imagination,” says Yevgeny Zaytsev, Marketing Director of PocketBook. “Apart from the obvious goals, - to raise brand awareness, - this video has one other task. We would like to breathe a new life into the classic characters and motivate young viewers to rediscover great novels by Mayne Reid, Arthur Conan Doyle and Bram Stoker.”
