ABOUT

Background

Evergreen was born out of a previous creative we produced for Verizon Wireless during the 2013 Holiday season called ‘Deal Days’.

'Deals days' primary function was as a pre-roll ad with full e-commerce functionality but entirely in a rich, immersive video experience.

The second feature was that it's content changed almost daily. For example, the featured employee would greet users differently depending on how close it was leading up to Xmas, from a casual “It’s cold out there, come inside to find the perfect gift” to “Still not found that perfect gift yet? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered!” or if it was a specific day related to promotions such as Black Friday or Cyber Monday, the creative adapted to this.

The fantastic results from Deal Days set in motion the client's desire for more.

Preproduction

Extensive planning was required, not only in covering the entire inventory of a real life store but also how to shoot and produce a year’s worth of content, that covered all the seasons and annual events. Valentine's Day, Easter, Mother's Day etc

Development

A bespoke modular system had to be built so that changes could be implemented quickly and keep the experience consistent. The extent of this customisation had to be considered to a very granular level, so that the copy in the background of a scene could be edited as the brand message shifts or products dropped and promoted.

Production

The shoot was on-location at an actual Verizon Flagship store in new Jersey, so the filming could only take place after the store had closed at 7pm and had to be cleaned up by 8am the next morning. This meant two nights working into the small hours to gather enough footage of the 5 separate actors to cover the last quarter of the year including the Holiday season.

I was on-set to monitor and act as a consultant for the production team from Click3x to ensure the footage matched our UI designs and the length of each of the actors' dialogue was within our asset limits.

Post and Code Build

The scenes were shot with small areas of green screen in specified sections behind the actors. This enabled our team to dynamically add video content for users to interact with inside the video, rather than a typical overlay UI.

To save time, we worked with the ungraded rushes from Click3x while the footage underwent multiple client reviews and began drawing all the assets together to build out the creative. The large catalogue of product renders from The Mill and their accompanying copy had to be comped into each individual expert. VO clips for every product, recorded by Moxie, had to be assigned to roll over and click actions then double and triple checked. Due to the nature of retail, many elements of the copy needed to be updated via a CMS as prices and tag lines change weekly.

Below are breakdowns of the compositions and interfaces implemented in the interactive scenes.