UPDATE!! 05/08/09 – This just in!  AKQA wins MI6 Gold for "Best Online Advertising Campaign" for Fallout 3, plus Bronze for Best Directing & Best Copywriting on "Jimmy & the Fat Man". Congratulations AKQA!  Glad we could be a part of it all!

03/03/09 - To launch Bethesda Softworks’ Fallout® 3, one of the year’s most highly anticipated games, innovative agency AKQA partnered with animation and design company Gasket to help produce a series of original promotional commercials seeded as virals and presented on the website: www.prepareforthefuture.com. The site is a carefully rendered retro-futuristic 1950’s world as delivered through the screen of a television, complete with spots that represent key content in the game which takes place in the “Capitol Wasteland” in and around Washington DC.

Gasket, who previously collaborated with AKQA on a series of game-related projects, was brought in for early production discussions.  AKQA embraced the idea of early involvement and while they had a very distinct direction and concept, the agency team and Gasket worked together closely to expand the project scope.  Integral to the project was Gasket’s ability to carefully craft material that would reflect this 1950’s future-vision aesthetic complete with authentically styled production approaches.  Agency AKQA conducted copious research about era-specific advertising, while Gasket delved deep into the milieu, reviewing government history reels and various classic spots available online. These sources were shared with the agency and other production partners, adding to an ever-growing resource pool.
 
Gasket was responsible for various levels of creative, from applying visual effects to live action footage, to traditional design and animation of both vignettes and complete pieces. For each, the Gasket team had to constantly reverse engineer its approach, working in an often counter-intuitive way to get the desired result, complete with halting transitions and jump cuts to capture the animation and drawing style popular in the day. In addition to complete deliverables, Gasket also supplied AKQA with a collection of assets to be used to integrate the spots into the site, and transition from original site content to footage from Fallout® 3. The complete effort required intense collaboration between AKQA and Gasket, as well as production company The Ant Farm , music company Sacred Noise and sound design company BWN.
 
 

 
For the "That’s Right Abe" commercial, AKQA employed the concept of the tourism billboard come to life as an introduction to exploring the fully-realized world of Washington D.C decay on the Fallout launch website.  Gasket used a traditional hand-drawn animation process in the style of "Duck and Cover" nuclear war preparedness psa–fitting, consider the apocalypse to come. All of the drawn materials, from the character design of Abe to the background map and the animation were created by Gasket.

 

 
Once the animation was complete Gasket applied compositing and visual effects to the live action father/son footage, adding detailed lighting cues and grungy, disintegrated static. As with many of the elements in this presentation, That’s Right Abe is part playful, part eerie. The spectre of what might be is always just around the corner.
 
 

 
 
 

 
The goal of the "Growing Up" spot is to show the Fallout icon of Vault Boy growing up getting his symbol of adulthood–the "Pip-Boy."  In Fallout 3 there’s a new and improved "Pip-Boy 3000" survival computer that actually functions as the user interface.  We worked closely with AKQA and Bethesda to capture this Fallout mascot in his baby and youth, which has never before been done. Chest -hairs may also have been a first.  We had to remain faithful to the character design while still making the animation original.  This spot was also hand animated in exacting detail.
 
 

 

 
AKQA set out to show the over the top violence of Fallout® 3 through a humorous 1950’s style "after school special."  What would you do if instead of dealing with a bully’s shenanigans, you could destroy him (and all living things within 200 yards of him) with your personal tactical nuclear catapult? If you said, “Heck yeah! I’d pull the trigger!” then Vault-Tec has your number.
 
 

 
For the disappearing bully, Gasket posed the question–how would they technically do this shot  in the 1950s?  We figured they would shoot two separate shots, holding the camera and talent as still as possible.  Then they’d edit the two shots together and layer a piece of film with the smoke effect over top of both layers.  There would be inherent shake and miss-match caused by the nature of the process.  A seemless, modern vfx approach would not have felt authentic.
 

 
They actually built the nuclear catapult (non-functioning, of course) for this shoot. Sadly, Gasket was not on set at the time and didn’t get to lay our greasy hands upon it. I think little Jimmy’s expression says it all, though. Mutually Assured Destruction? Sign me up!
 
 

 
This spot was a mock psa that touts the advanced robot sentry for the Metro subway in the pre-war Washington, D.C.  Most of the illustrations and the Metro Protectron model were all supplied by Bethesda from the game.  Our goal with this spot was to give it a kitschy sense of timing and make the formidable Protectron seem friendly. 
 
While the Protectron in the game world is rusty and grungy, we retooled the model textures to make him seem new again, since the spot was theoretically created before the apocalypse.
 
 

We were honored to work with the amazing Protectron model from Bethesda Softworks. Much of the Gasket crew enjoys gaming, so getting to work with a piece of the actual videogame was tremendous. We’ve noted some important features of the Protectron for your viewing pleasure.  Spoiler Alert!

Those who have played the game may understand why the protectron is wearing a wig. Of course, you’ll have to discover that piece of info on your own.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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