Break out of the simulation with Isle of Any and Oscar Hudson’s new video game-inspired advert for Coinbase

“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.

The BTS materials from the ad are as fascinating as the ad itself. The set design is pure uncanny valley – it looks blurred and stretched out like crummy PlayStation graphics yet physically imposing. You discover that the characters are not digitally created, but in fact real people in painted costumes, with choreographers teaching the difference between organic movement and stiff NPC movement, as well as how far the team went to create a real world filled with fake textures. “For several years, Coinbase has used the line ‘It’s time to update the system’ to highlight how outdated and inefficient parts of the financial system still are – things like slow money movement, unnecessary steps and processes people accept simply because they’ve always existed,” says Catherine Ferdon, chief marketing officer of Coinbase. “This film is a cinematic invitation to leave it behind.”

“It’s almost impossible to take in what Oscar and his team pulled together – every element from shadowless game lighting, the painted costumes that are weighted to feel like game design. Masks of characters reprinted back onto their own heads, deliberately pixelated set design,” says Laurie. There’s an incredible triumphant feeling that is created from the ad, proving how short-form narratives can really nail a feeling as well as providing inspiration for the art of physical, in-camera filmmaking – then again, as Sammy Davis Jr’s heart-soaring tune I’ve Gotta Be Me blasts, it’s hard not to feel it in your bones.