Resident Evil 6 Ad Campaign

491 No Hope Left - The ad campaign for the launch of video game, Resident Evil 6

Video Game giant, Capcom are set to release Resident Evil 6 on 2nd October. The franchise has sold over 27 million copies and the Japanese makers estimate its value at over $600m (£377.3m).

London based Ad Agency, Brothers and Sisters were appointed to advertise the release of the game in December last year.

At the time, director of marketing strategy at Capcom, Mickey Torode said: "It was clear that Brothers and Sisters understood what was needed and nohopeleft.com is only the start of what will be a horrific, fearful and very emotional journey through 2012.”

We asked the Producer of the adverts and member of thecallsheet.co.uk, Shaun Nickless to tell us about the campaign.....

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What was the overall strategy for the campaign and what mediums were you using? Are you looking at a global or local audience?  

This is a multi-platform global campaign, so we’re hitting most mediums while targeting our core audience of young men. First we built the website www.nohopeleft.com and started drip-feeding video clips and stills images featuring graffiti of the biohazard logo which had been “found” in various places around the world.  This was prior even to the announcement of the planned release of the game. As well as online, we’re releasing the ads in cinema, TV and through social media. There is print, outdoor and POS activity. The ads are being shown globally on TV and cinema, in 7 different countries including the UK.

The product itself is a Zombie killing role play game, does that mean the brand and client are looking for a more extreme campaign?

Definitely. Mickey Torode was great to work with. He was up for all our ideas of creating a sense that the situations depicted in the ads felt 100% real and as extreme and mysterious as possible. The Last Goodbyes messages are all shot on iphones or webcams and many of them are recorded in foreign languages and released with no subtitles. All this adds to the intrigue and the global feel of the ads.  Mickey even suggested in the PPM that we should run the ads without a logo on to “really freak people out”. I think that must be an advertising first!

Most of the viral ads are shot like YouTube films uploaded by various people around the world, how did you cast and shoot those clips?

We cast and shot five or six of these clips, some of which have yet to be released, the others were created by the global public, which is great. This clip is an edit of many of the Lost Messages, one of them had over 375,000 views on Youtube.

An edit of the"Last Goodbyes" which emerged on YouTube over the course of 2012

The 60' commercial features a number of cast and locations, how and where did you film it? 

Where to shoot was a major question right from the start. Due to budget constraints, we needed to find a single destination that could offer a number of global-looking locations which looked like lots of different countries, good quality local cast and great value for money on production costs. I had a number of countries quote it out for me including Poland, South Africa, Uruguay, Argentina, Romania, Hungary & Ukraine.  

High casting buyouts ruled out a number of places and we decided to shoot it in Lisbon, which is a great place to shoot. You get a lot more bang for your buck there than in nearby Spain and you still get good weather, crews and a wealth of different locations. We used Southwest Productions down there, who I have used before and they were brilliant for this; really keen from the get-go to help us make the limited budget stretch as far as possible. We also shot a couple of scenes in the UK and in total it was a 5 day shoot. 

The 60' advert that premiered after the Moldova Vs England Football match on 07/09/2012

The casting took place simultaneously in the two countries, to make sure we got the best actors we could possibly afford and it worked out really well, with roughly a 50/50 split across the whole campaign.

We shot the ads on a number of different formats including iPhone 4, webcams, 5D and 8mm & 16mm film. The 60" is purely 16mm, shot on the Arri SR3. DOP Tim Maurice Jones (Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch, The Woman In Black) was brilliant - really enthusiastic, creative and keen to make the most of all the different formats we threw at him.

Pat Holden (Away Days, When The Lights Went Out) directed the ads and his movie experience came in really useful as he wanted to approach it like a short film, or movie trailer, rather than a traditionally crafted ad. The idea behind this was to help make it feel as real and gritty as possible. We shot all the scenes whole, as you would in a film, rather than from a shot-by-shot storyboard and the results have been really great for this one. It was awesome using 16mm again, it's such a great format.

The post production was done by Big Buoy in Soho and even this was a complete reversal of the norm in some ways. We left all the scratches and dust on the 16mm film neg rather than cleaning it up, again to add to the gritty feel. When we graded the scenes, we gave each a unique and different look, which also helped add to the global look. Everyone who has seen it so far has found it difficult to believe we shot it mostly in one city – in fact five of the scenes were shot in one house, which we used as a kind of studio to save money, but you wouldn't know thanks to the craft of the local Art Director, Artur Pinheiro.

That ad was a 60” version which ran without a logo at the end, it just had an end frame with “No Hope Left” in white against black. Clearcast made us put a legal super on it saying “this is a commercial”, because there isn’t really any way of telling otherwise.

 

How important is social media in contrast to TV advertising, particularly to brands such as Capcom?

Our digital team here did a great job of seeding the site and getting gamers around the world speculating on it. We had ♯nohopeleft and ♯nhl both trending in the top three on twitter for several hours the night before the announcement, which was a huge success. It’s important when you’re after a young audience to use the tools they’re using to communicate with them, that’s why social media is so crucial to this campaign in particular.