He Is Not BETWINNER to You

The betting company BETWINNER turned to 9 Pandas to shoot a commercial for them with a focus on a young audience in Russia who have become more involved in Russian politics (Petukhov V., 2019). We have used this trend and produced a commercial disguised as investigative films of opposition politician A. Navalny — the audience is more emotionally involved because of reading familiar visual codes without realizing them (Yi Y., 1990).

Protagonist of the commercial is a very rich man who mocks people around who organized surveillance to him using a drone to find out the secret of his success like in A. Navalny's investigative films. Humorous absurdity is enhanced by exaggeration — at some moment there is not one drone watching the man, but a thousand. In the final shots the main character walking around the yard of his private house in a bathrobe raises his hands to the sky and exclaims that he is tired of hinting to others about the secret of his success. And we see the logo «BETWINNER» laid by money on the lawn — BETWINNER is the secret. There is no fraud.

We needed 3 locations in accordance with our task. There were no difficulties with the house and the restaurant, but with the garage there were — after several weeks of searching we realized that we could not find a suitable one and decided to build it. In preparation before filming we made a pre-visualization which showed the exact dimensions of the required location. We needed two walls and two light lines on them at a certain height in order for the location to «act» as much as possible — their location was also shown by the pre-visualization. We hit the drone twice on this video, but, of course, artificially and in accordance with safety regulations. The drones were one of the protagonists and it was not easy to place them in the required place, frame, height and position on the stage at low altitudes especially surrounded by people. Of course, there were some graphics and technical tweaks, for instance, the reflection in the car window caused a lot of problems, but it seems that everything turned out well. While filming it was incredibly enjoyable to listen to the bow quintet.