“Life’s a game, sometimes it feels like someone else has the controller,” says Laurie Howel, founder of creative company Isle of Any, who (along with fellow co-founder Toby Treyer-Evans) collaborated with Oscar Hudson to create a brand new cinematic advertisement for cryptocurrency exchange app Coinbase. Utilising the aesthetics of low polygon models from old 3D videogames, such as earlier titles in the Grand Theft Auto series, Half Life or even the London-inspired GTA copy The Getaway, the ad – titled Your Way Out – aired halfway through the Oscars, dropping watchers into a digital, dystopian world. Making use of an isometric view with nods to The Sims, the narrative follows a videogame character learning his own autonomy in a city full of NPCs. As he escapes a menacing cursor, he begins a cat and mouse chase that ends in his being freed from an automated, claustrophobic system.
The ad was made to make viewers question the systems that are in place which have been commonly accepted as “the only way to do things”. What better way to communicate that message than through a character escaping his own digital simulacrum to burst back into reality. “We always knew we wanted to start in ‘game world’, using the visual language and game vernacular to set up a change,” says Laurie. “We wanted that transformation to happen gradually as our protagonist gains more and more control, eventually finding himself in the real world.” Director Oscar Hudson decided to create all of the effects in-camera so the viewer could “feel the humanity and imperceptible change from beginning to end”, continues Lauriw. It’s super effective – as the ad nears its climatic moments, everything from the colour grading to the stilted camera angles mark a radical break from the fixed lens we all know from video game aesthetics.