Telstra’s bespoke agency +61 has revealed how it captured 20,000 dominoes falling in a long chain reaction in a single take to showcase the telco’s home internet capabilities.
The campaign, developed in partnership with art director Rachel Thomas and director Dan Tobin Smith, features thousands of colourful dominoes falling, one against the other in a long row of tiles.
The 30-second hero film, titled Experience Beautiful Internet, combines classical music with a series of elegant domino runs.
+61 creative directors Cam Dowsett and Mark Tallis said the original brief was to showcase how all the features of Telstra Home internet add up to more than the sum of its parts.
“We realised pretty quickly that what people actually care about is their internet working seamlessly throughout their home,” the duo told AdNews.
“So rather than telling people about ‘proof points’, we decided to just show a beautiful internet performance instead. The dominoes became the visual metaphor that helped us do it.”
More than 20,000 dominos were custom made to have white sides and one white face, with a mix of Telstra’s brand colours on the other.
Dowsett and Tallis said a team of experts spent an entire day “painstakingly” arranging the dominoes on a bespoke set.
“They used projections of the full runs onto the floors to help them set it all up,” they said.
“For straight lines they had some little tools that helped them place multiple lines at once, but the curves were all done by eye.”
The experts used a specially designed “rake” to evenly push multiple rows of dominoes at once without disrupting the frame.
Dowsett and Tallis said there was no opportunity for test runs, so every detail had to be meticulously planned prior to the shoot.
“Dan and Rachel had even factored in the fall rate of dominoes as they planned their shots,” the duo said.
“In the setup stage, there were a few accidents where little sections were knocked over, but we had stoppers in the runs to contain any mistakes to smaller sections rather than starting from scratch.
“During the shoot itself, there was only one sequence that we reshot as the speed of the dominoes was too slow, so the guys rebuilt it to fall at double the speed.”
Dowsett and Tallis said the team took some of the dominoes and recorded smaller runs in the studio to create authentic SFX.
“They gave quite a few bags of them to us to bring back for our sound engineers at Sonar to recreate the authentic sound of them falling, which they did an amazing foley job on,” they said.
“The crew also took some, we brought some back for Telstra, and we also have a suitcase full at the +61 office if you want to come and set them up.”
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