Sony 3D: Two Worlds

When Nils Leonard, ECD at Grey London, saw Arev Manoukian's short film Nuit Blanche he realised that he'd found what he was looking for. He had a powerful, emotional poem from the legendary Leonard Cohen and knew that combining it with Manoukian's directorial flair, and especially with a new take on Nuit Blanche, he would have an equally powerful and emotional commercial. He wasn't wrong. Below Leonard explains the details of how the project came to be:

"We had a script with the words of Leonard Cohen's poem, That’s What I Heard You Say, but we had few ideas as to what might happen under these words. But when we found Nuit Blanche it really just captured a unique, powerful romance that I hadn't seen before. It was one of the only things I'd seen that could do justice to the words. So we started talking to Arev straight away.

We approached Arev with a view to taking the power and beauty of Nuit Blanche to a new level. Not only merging it with what Sony as a brand might feel like but also creating a world first in 3D. If we could create the detail and simplicity of Nuit Blanche in stereoscopic 3D that would really be something special. It would be the antidote to cars flying out of screens and all that 3D stuff we’ve all seen before.

Arev was great to work with. His ambitions matched our own and just making an ad wasn’t enough for him. We wanted to create something larger, that would really land in popular culture as a piece of entertainment.

Leonard [Cohen] also loved Arevs work, I think the level of originality and beauty in the project drew Leonard in. I'd always heard Leonards voice on the film, having seen him recite the poem at his live shows it was clear how moving the words were. To match his tone, power and space to a film like Arevs was irresistible.

In keeping with the high quality of partners in the project Clint Mansell had always been my favourite composer. His work on the Fountain in particular again captured romance in a new way. And his scores always managed to add real power to epic landscapes or provocative filmmaking.

This 3D project was the most ambitious I’ve ever made because the entire film was created from the start with the end goal in mind vs. simply attempting to make a 2D project come alive after creation. It also became more complex because of the long, slow visuals which allow the viewer to really interrogate the scene.

The most difficult part of this project was simply the ambition and scale of the piece we wanted to make. It was a movie standard production really trying to push at what had been done in 3D previously within an advertising arena."