Great to be on board. This is exactly the kind of film campaign I love to make.
What you're about to read builds directly on everything we've talked about: the chain reaction, the transitions, the comedy, the community. The script gave us a great skeleton, and this document is the muscle. How I see the film beat by beat, how we make the game world bulletproof, who our heroes are, and how sixty seconds carries all of it without a single dead frame.
One note before you dive in. Nothing here is decoration. Every idea in this treatment protects the same thing: that lightning-in-a-bottle moment when someone screams "how did you do that?!" and can't rest until they find out.
While the 60 second film is the hero, the campaign has been built with short-form in mind from the beginning. For different aspect ratios and durations. Each 15 second film is designed to work as its own piece, with a clear hook, strong storytelling and a satisfying payoff. Each of these films is a moment built to live and perform in its own right.
That's it for now. I hope you like my treatment, and I can't wait to discuss it further and make it even better together.
Petr
Sixty seconds, fully loaded.
The whole film on one screen. Ten beats, three heroes, one question, and not a single dead frame. Scroll the timeline, then watch it happen in the story section. I've labelled the key story function of each beat, so you can see its purpose in the wider story. And please keep in mind, these are AI boards built to set out story function, not to indicate exact framing or blocking. See them as jumping off points for us to refine, which I pick up on below.
Sixty seconds sounds short until you load it right. Every beat in this film does at least two jobs: a laugh and a hand-off, a product moment and a story turn. The transitions carry the baton. Gags keep the pulse up. And the easter eggs? Those belong to the community. One question carries everything, whispered, gasped, typed, screamed.
This is a minute engineered beat by beat, for an audience that decides in three seconds and rewards every second that earns the next.
One second to stop them. Three to win them.
Our audience decides in one second and commits in three. Not because they're impatient. They're trained. The feed taught them to smell filler, and they're one thumb-flick from something else at all times. So no warm-up, no establishing. We open at full throttle and make skipping feel like a mistake.
That's the hook: a promise of how the whole film will feel. Big, fast, funny, fluent. By the time "YOU LOSE" hits the screen, the audience is asking the exact question the film is about.
We win them in three seconds. Then we spend fifty-seven earning the rewatch.
Watch it in your head.
Ten beats, sixty seconds. Every hand-off is a transition, every transition is an idea. And one question travels through it all, whispered, gasped, typed, screamed, until every voice that asked it walks into the arena with the crowd. Here's the film as I see it. Scroll right to see it unfold, and scroll down to read on.
Note: these indicative AI boards are not to be taken too literally. They are here to start assembling the story structure and to break down the key beats. From there we keep building with visual mockups and more detailed boards.
The popcorn version above is my favourite, but Lenny is your mascot and how far she steps into the action is worth deciding together. Three alternatives we like:
Lenny the sidekick. She rides on Anna Key's shoulder or her back, in her own post-apocalyptic outfit. When we cut to her, she coughs up a couple of pulse grenades that go off milliseconds later, right beside her, and she doesn't flinch. She's part of the action without changing who wins the fight.
Lenny brings a bigger gun. She's on the boulder as before, but this time she hauls out an absurdly oversized sniper rifle and takes aim at the bridge. Cut to the scope view: crosshairs settling on the mech, range and wind data ticking along the edges of the frame. And then, right there inside her scope, Anna Key's anti-grav ray hits and the mech ragdolls out of the shot. Lenny never fires. She just happened to have the best seat and the best optics in the game. The joke is the scale of the weapon against the size of the creature, and the fight still belongs to Anna.
Lenny hits an emote. Mid-battle, on a chunk of ruin, Lenny is doing a full in-game emote. Serious, committed, perfectly executed, and completely the wrong moment for it. She isn't watching the fight and she isn't part of it. She's just vibing while the world ends behind her. Every player has seen someone do this at the worst possible time, and it's the kind of thing the community clips without being asked. It also comes back for free: after VICTORY in the rematch, same rock, same emote, this time as a celebration.
All of these work. Happy to take this further with you in pre-production.
We open inside the game, full cinematic mode. A colossal sci-fi bridge. Two figures charging at each other: Anna Key, small and fearless, and NIL-EGO, a mech the size of a building. Earth-shaking footsteps. They halt just feet apart. The size difference is absurd, the outcome looks decided before it starts, and for two seconds we go full western. Extreme close-up on Anna Key's eyes. Extreme close-up on the mech's optic lens. A glitchy low-poly tumbleweed rolls across the bridge. High noon, patch v2.4.7.
At peak tension, a half-second smash-cut: Lenny, perched on a chunk of ruin nearby, paw deep in a popcorn bucket, eyes wide. Back to the fight.
The mech winds up. Metal muscles twitch, power builds with a thunderous low rumble, and everything says this is over. Then, cutting him off mid-charge, we snap wider and Anna Key's arm cannon fires an anti-grav ray. NIL-EGO ragdolls off the bridge the way physics engines ragdoll: still in one piece, limbs loose and twisted into impossible positions, dignity nowhere, deeply funny. A huge "YOU LOSE" hits the screen.
The "YOU LOSE" doesn't stay on the screen. The letters push through the glass and break out of the monitor into the room, physical and heavy, and we pull out past them into a real bedroom. Sam rips off his headset and it arcs across the desk in the exact same ballistic curve the mech just flew, past the RGB glow of his Legion Tower 5i and landing next to a Lenny plushie. The plushie doesn't react. It has seen this before. And Sam, still staring at the screen, shouts it at nobody:
"HOW DID THEY DO THAT?!"
And then, for the first time, we properly meet him. The shouting stops. He sits back, still staring at the screen, and something sets in his face. Not anger any more. He's already decided he's going to figure this out.
Sam types "How do you…" on the Tower 5i and the internet buries him. Browser tabs don't stay on the monitor. They spill past its edges, stacking up around him in the room, walls of threads and thumbnails closing in. "Why Mech is the most OP character". "15 reasons not to play Mech, unless you want to suck". Reddit wars, Discord build guides. Somewhere in the flood, one thumbnail looks suspiciously like a creator you might recognize.
He picks up the Legion Go 2 without leaving his chair, the search still running in his hands. In front of him the monitor gives up and drifts into its screensaver: Lenny, bouncing around the empty desktop, pulling faces, doing tricks for nobody. He clicks a video: "How to get OP in 5 mins". Runtime: 2 hours 35 minutes. A sigh. Playback speed: 4x. And for half a second, our film obeys: the cut, the music, Sam's movements, everything runs at 4x.
Then he plays. The "YOU LOSE" screens don't disappear. They stack, tiling into a grid. Four. Nine. Sixteen windows of defeat. Then one single cut: a clean screen.
The wall of defeats clears, and we're back in the game. The mech charges Anna Key again.
This time he's ready. Before she can fire her signature move, NIL-EGO lifts off the bridge, red and blue heat blooming through his plating as the whole back unfolds into a missile rack. He empties it. The bridge disappears in white.
Flash-cut: Lenny behind the same rock, popcorn flying everywhere.
"VICTORY" emblazons the screen.
Same victory screen, but now we're looking at it through the semi-transparent display of a Legion Pro 7i, "YOU LOSE" mirrored across the face of Alex. Same camera move as Sam's reveal, opposite direction: with him we pulled out of defeat, with her we look into it. Defeat reads differently from the other side of the glass.
Her friend leans in over her shoulder, just as stunned as she is: "How did you do THAT?" Neither of them has a clue. Alex pulls the laptop back and, quietly, almost to herself, she asks it again: "No, seriously… how did they do that?" Then we're in tight on the keyboard, and she types the whole thing out, letter by letter. H. O. W. D. I. D. T. H. E. Y. D. O. T. H. A. T. Every key its own cut, every hit landing like a drum, the question building in front of us one stroke at a time. Then her thumb comes down on Enter and holds it there a second longer than it needs to. The question stops being spoken. It becomes work.
The key bottoms out, and we're in CAD. Alex works on her Legion Pro 7i, rotating a 3D model of the mech. She drags a slider and the robot separates into an exploded view, so wide it stops fitting on the screen and spills past the edges into the room. The camera keeps moving, up and over the display onto her desk, where for one breath her tools and components levitate in the same exploded composition. Digital and physical, one grammar.
She clicks, scales, spins and twists every part, then slams them back together. The reassembled mech looks like a scrapyard's idea of a sculpture. Nothing where it should be, everything somehow still attached. Close-up on the mech's face. Sad binary bleeps, and the subtitle types itself out in sync, one bleep at a time: "Why did you do that…" the last word hanging on a loading stutter "…?" Even his disappointment buffers.
A wave of realisation. A pair of wings hangs from her desk lamp, turning slowly, and their shadow spreads across the wall, huge and clean, more design than object. Focus pulls from the shadow to her face, and the idea lands. She scraps the mech and builds her own character from nothing. Shapes pull themselves out of the grid: a weapon, then armour, then a pair of wings that shouldn't work and absolutely do. She hits save: "character_FINAL_really_final_v67". The T-posed model goes online. Likes, hearts and thumbs up rain through the room around her, and the character comes alive, in-game. And then Alex is playing as her. Same hands, same chair, same look on her face as when she lost. Except now the thing on the screen is hers. She didn't stop being a player when she started making. She just came back with better weapons. The reactions keep falling as we push through them.
Her friend drifts back in behind her, watching over her shoulder, and this time there's nothing but respect in it: "How did you do that?"
The falling reactions become a comment feed, scrolling under a launch trailer on a Legion Rollable in the reference corner of a cosplay workshop. Max watches Alex's character move for the first time, absolute awe on her face. Then the character opens her wings, and the wingspan runs straight off the edges of the screen. Max reaches over without taking her eyes off it and pulls the display wider, until the whole figure fits. She isn't looking at the machine. She's looking at the wings: "How do I MAKE this?"
A high-energy montage, all in close-up. A blade opening a sheet of foam. A print head sprinting back and forth. Glue where glue shouldn't be, and a yelp. Paint hanging in the air. And time is honest here. Jump cuts let day turn to night behind the window, the desk clutter grows, energy drink cans multiply, the rollable stays open on reference across the room, and a blueprint stamped MK.III sits under her hands. This work takes time, and the film respects that.
Max connects two cables. LEDs flicker to life, then short her entire workshop into darkness. One by one, the LEDs re-ignite in the dark, sketching only the silhouette of the finished cosplay. That's all we get for now, teasing out the mystery.
A camera flash throws us onto a convention floor, and the flash IS the reveal: the finished cosplay, seen properly for the first time, mid-photo, looking incredible. Glory earned.
As Max walks out of frame, crash zoom onto a cosplayer behind her wearing a laughably amateur cardboard version of the same armour. Admiration and jealousy in one look: "How did you do that?" A strip of tape gives up. The cardboard wing hits the floor.
He picks it up, presses the tape back down, and walks on. And in his eyes, for half a second, the exact same spark Sam had when he started typing "How do you…"
Another flash. Esports fans drift past with hand-written signs: TEAM ANNA KEY, NIL-EGO LIVES, fan-art of both bosses. This game has fandoms. They push open double doors, we fly into the darkness with the roar of a crowd rising, and under it, layered like a chant, every voice that asked the question: a whisper, a laugh, a scream. Pillars of light ignite an epic stage: the silhouette of a gamer at a full Legion battlestation, Tower 5i and monitor, screens running v3.0.0.
Close-up: Sam lowers his headphones, determined. Then the question comes back one last time, in the loudest voice it has had all film. The first syllable of the shoutcaster lands over his face, sound ahead of picture, and then it explodes: "HOW. DID. THEY. DO THAT!?"
The very last detail before we go: the Lenny plushie, sitting on the battlestation desk. It travelled. It has seen the whole thing. Then Lenny turns, looks straight at us and erupts into angry mode, cutting the picture into a burst of glitches and beeps, maybe even cracking the viewer's screen. And out of that chaos we land on the end card: Lenovo Legion. Reach Your Impossible. On the product screen, the in-game victory plays out.
Every format gets the full experience.
This campaign lives on the internet. That's not a constraint, it's the brief: two years, global, every screen except the ones in living rooms and cinemas. So we don't shoot a TVC and slice it up afterwards. We shoot a system.
This film is built to come apart, which means the cutdowns inherit real stories instead of highlights. Three fifteens, three complete arcs:
Hook: the standoff and the ragdoll. Payoff: VICTORY. A full story of defeat, obsession and a comeback.
Hook: YOU LOSE mirrored across her face. Payoff: her own character alive in the game. The complete arc of curiosity turning into creation.
Hook: the launch trailer that stops her mid-thought. Payoff: the con floor, the glory and the cardboard wing. Craft, start to finish.
The 30 is the film with the connective tissue trimmed, rather than everything rushed into one 30 second cut. The 6s are single gags that need no context: the ragdoll, the wing, the blackout. And the 10s for TikTok get treated as their own creative, platform-native from the first cut. The YOU LOSE grid alone is a TikTok-shaped idea: grid stacking, hard cut, victory. Born vertical, not converted.
This is where the beat structure pays for itself. Because the products are doing jobs in the story rather than sitting in the frame, they come along automatically when the film comes apart. The Sam fifteen is built on the Tower 5i and the Go 2. The Alex fifteen runs on the Pro 7i. The Max fifteen opens on the Rollable, and its biggest moment is the screen growing to hold a wingspan.
The short formats get just as much attention, because that's where most of this campaign will actually be watched. The six second cuts in particular are built, not trimmed: each one is designed from the boards up with a product in it, placed where it belongs in the moment rather than dropped in to tick a box. No cut leaves the building without a machine in frame, and none of them has to stop and point at it.
We design key scenes for multiple ratios from the moment we start storyboarding: 16:9, 9:16, 1:1 and 4:5 all get real compositions. On set that means protecting the frame edges, staging action that works tall AND wide, and shooting selected setups twice where the formats genuinely want different framing: the exploded view, the arena reveal, the YOU LOSE wall. Nothing in post should ever have to apologize for how it was shot.
The 4x5 loops and carousels come from moments engineered to loop: Lenny's popcorn, the buffering binary complaint, the LED silhouette igniting. And the lifestyle photography rides the shoot itself: same worlds, same authenticity. Fifteen product images that look like frames from the film, because they practically are. We'll explore a range of photographers in and around our chosen filming hub and, like the film, plan it in as much detail as we can in pre-production.
Everything above shares the visual DNA: same grade, same energy, same easter-egg logic. A person who meets this campaign as a 6-second gag, a carousel, or the full film should recognize it instantly as the same world. That consistency is what makes the whole campaign sing.
The tech that plays a hero role in our story.
The brief says it best: the product cannot be a passive prop. So every Legion device in this film has a job in the story, a beat it drives, a moment that wouldn't happen without it. Audiences smell product placement from a mile away, so the products have to live in the story for real. Each of our three heroes has a core machine that belongs to them, with the wider ecosystem living naturally around it.
Sam's bedroom is built around the Tower 5i: the RGB heartbeat of the room, the machine the whole space orbits, and the machine he loses on in the opening. Then the Go 2 carries the hardest-working stretch of the film: tutorials at 4x, build guides in bed, one "YOU LOSE" after another. The grind goes wherever Sam goes, because the Go does. The product as a training montage, a habit lived on screen. Every gamer watching knows exactly what that handheld glow at 2 a.m. means. And when he reaches the stage at the end, he sits down at a Tower 5i again. The same machine that watched him lose is the one that carries him to the biggest game of his life.
Alex creates on the Pro 7i, and it is in almost every frame of her story. It's the screen her defeat is mirrored across, the machine she tears the mech apart on, and the one where a brand new character gets built from nothing. A creator's machine doing creator's work, with no feature theatre around it.
The rollable is Max's machine, in the clean corner of her workshop where a maker plans before she builds. I wanted one specific action that shows what this device actually does, rather than parking it on a desk and hoping somebody notices. So when Alex's character spreads her wings and the wingspan runs off the edges of the screen, Max reaches over without taking her eyes off it and pulls the display wider, until the whole figure fits. She needs to see the character at full width to build it, and the screen gives her that.
We know the unit on the shoot won't be the final product, so the coverage is designed around that from the boards up. We stay on the front of the device and on what's happening on the screen. No cuts to the hardware on its own, nothing from behind, no lingering on the mechanics. We show exactly what we need to, and only what we can. How much the rollable features is completely open for discussion.
The full Legion ecosystem assembles for the finale: Tower 5i and monitor on stage for the sake of realism, keyboard, mouse, headset, and stage light hitting the complete setup like a boss arena. It's the one moment the film flexes hardware openly, and it can afford to. By then, every device on that stage has already earned its place in the story.
Headphones, mice, keyboards, mousepads, backpack, the Lenny plushie. Set dressing that's actually authentic, placed where real players place them. If you know the gear, you'll spot it. If you don't, you'll just get the feeling these rooms belong to people who play.
This is how the products landed most naturally for me once I put them into the story rather than onto it. Sam lives on a tower and a handheld, Alex creates on a laptop, and Max plans on a screen wide enough to hold a whole character. All of it is of course open for discussion, and I'm very happy to move things around with you. I just wanted to show you a version where every machine has a reason to be in the frame.
Shot loud. Cut fast. Built to hold attention.
Energy is every craft pulling in the same direction, built to keep a trained audience exactly where we want them: leaning in.
Every creative decision is made to keep the audience engaged. Performance, camera, edit and sound all working together to create momentum from the first frame to the last.
The storytelling is simple and purposeful. Every scene moves the story forward. Every beat earns the next. Nothing lingers longer than it needs to.
The edit has confidence. It moves quickly when the story demands it, then knows exactly when to pause and let a moment properly land. Those quieter moments give the bigger laughs, the bigger reveals and the bigger emotional beats room to work.
The result is a film that feels effortless to watch. Fast without feeling rushed. Clear without over-explaining. Rewarding from the first viewing to the second, to the third, to the fourth and the fifth.
See the mood film for an example of where we could take this.
Transitions you'll want to rewind.
Let's be clear about the craft here: this film cuts hard. Fast, confident, meme-fluent hard cuts do the everyday work. That's the native rhythm of the content our audience lives in. But on the seams that matter, every time the question jumps from one person to the next, one world to the next, we use a dynamic transition. Nine moves, all motivated by story, none of them decoration. A transition in this film is a purposeful event, and never filler.
The screen is the membrane between worlds, and we cross it twice, in opposite directions. With Sam, we pull out through "YOU LOSE", text reading correctly: we're leaving the game with him. With Alex, we look in through her semi-transparent display, text mirrored: we're meeting defeat from the other side of the glass. Same camera language, inverted meaning. That inversion IS the baton pass.
The mech ragdolls off the bridge, and one cut later Sam's headset flies off in the exact same ballistic arc, landing next to the plushie. The game's physics leak into the bedroom for half a second. Small object, same curve, instant connection.
Sam sets the tutorial to 4x, and the film itself obeys: cut, music, movement, everything sprints for half a second. The interface doesn't just sit on screen, it directs the film. A joke every viewer under thirty feels in their body.
Alex whispers the question, and then she types it. Macro on the keyboard, the whole sentence letter by letter, every key its own cut, every hit landing like a drum. The title of the film gets typed out in front of us by the person it is about to change. Her thumb holds Enter down a beat longer than it needs to, and the moment the key bottoms out we're inside CAD.
Alex explodes the mech in CAD on her Pro 7i until it stops fitting on the screen, and the camera keeps moving, over the display and onto her desk, where her tools levitate in the same exploded composition for one breath. Digital and physical, one grammar. The motif comes back later on Max's workbench, foam pieces laid out like a diagram, an exploded view you can touch. Two different worlds united by a consistent visual signature.
The camera flash is a device to reveal story in a powerful way. The blackout in the workshop gives us only a silhouette, whereas the flash on the con floor gives us the finished cosplay properly for the first time, after teasing the look in darkness moments before. Then a second flash carries us toward the arena doors. Same device, but the stakes have grown. And the flash is always diegetic: a real photographer on the con floor, a real fan outside the arena. Light actually captured in the scene, not a quick fix added in post.
We hear the next scene before we see it: the crowd rumbling behind closed doors, the shoutcaster's first syllable landing on Sam's face before the cut. This drives us forwards and keeps the viewer locked in. (Full arrangement lives in Sound & Music.)
Physical movement passes the baton just like screens do. Alex's friend yanks the laptop: whip pan. Max swings the x-acto knife: the cut flies with the blade. A hand grabs an energy drink: crash zoom somewhere else. The camera carries story action and momentum straight through the cut. Rougher, more handheld, less calculated, and exactly the crash-zoom, whip-pan energy this chain reaction runs on.
Alex's character goes online and the reactions rain through her room. We push straight through them, and they reassemble as a comment feed under a launch trailer on Max's laptop. The baton here is a community in dialogue with each other, rather than something simply passed through a screen. That's how a creation actually travels. It gets passed around until it reaches someone who has to build it.
Each of these will be storyboarded, prevized and locked before the shoot. Transitions this precise are built and agreed in prep. Reference reel drops in here: one moving example per move, so nobody has to imagine anything.
Relatable places, not sets.
Every space in this film belongs to someone. They should feel lived in, worn, authentic. These are the rooms this generation actually lives in, r/battlestations truth instead of catalogue fantasy, and they'll clock a fake in one frame: the too-clean desk, the cable management nobody actually has, the RGB placed by a stylist instead of an owner. So we build the way our heroes live. One rule across all of it: if it looks too art-directed or staged, it goes.
A real gamer bedroom, straight from the community, built around a Legion Tower 5i. Screen light and RGB as the primary sources, daylight fighting through half-closed blinds. Posters layered over older posters, headset wear on the chair, even an empty energy drink graveyard. The Lenny plushie sits where a real one would, not staged, not obvious. This room needs to feel like 2 a.m., because that's when the grind happens.
A creator's corner: a Legion Pro 7i, a drawing tablet, sketches taped to the wall, a chair that's seen better days. Slightly tidier than Sam's world, she makes things in a more orderly way, but it is still real and never staged: reference prints, half-finished ideas, maybe a dying plant. The light is cooler, screen-led and focused. A space built for curiosity and creativity.
This one we treat with extra love, because the brief asks for it and the community deserves it. A real cosplay workspace, built with real cosplayers as consultants. It has two zones, the way these rooms really do: a clean reference corner with a Legion Rollable, wide enough to hold a full character at proper scale, and then the build bench itself, EVA foam sheets and offcuts everywhere, a 3D printer mid-job, heat gun, contact cement, sandpaper grades lined up, worbla scraps, reference boards, a blueprint stamped MK.III. Materials shown honestly: foam dust, glue strings, burnt fingertips. These are not theatre costumes and never will be. Cosplay is engineering with passion, and the set design has to say so before a single line of dialogue could. Day turns to night behind the window, clutter grows, the build takes the time it really takes. And we bring the community in properly, with cosplayers consulting on the build, the materials and the details that only they would catch. This scene isn't about depicting cosplay culture. It's made with it.
The place a build like Max's is made for. Long aisles of stalls, artist alley prints, display cases, homemade banners, cosplayers photographing cosplayers. Bright, busy, a bit chaotic, and lit like a real hall rather than a set: flat overheads, colour bouncing off booth graphics, camera flashes going off constantly. The crowd here is the point. These are the people who understand exactly how much work went into that armour, which is why the flash reveal lands so hard, and why the guy in cardboard behind her is one of them rather than a joke at their expense.
The game world gets the same attention as any set we build. The bridge, the ruins, Lenny's popcorn rock: every part of it designed with game-logic geography, then lit and graded in the same visual language as the live action, so crossing between worlds feels like walking through a door, not switching channels.
The finale deserves its own scale, and the honest way to get that scale is to build it. We shoot Sam for real: the battlestation on a raised platform, practical stage lighting rigged around him, haze in the air, a handful of real fans in the front rows so the reactions closest to camera are true. Everything beyond that platform is green, and the venue itself is built in post.
That's not a compromise, it's how we get a room this big to feel completely real. Building the hall in VFX means we control the scale, the crowd, the light and the depth exactly, instead of negotiating with whatever venue we could afford to hire. Darkness first: we fly through the double doors hearing the crowd before we see it. Then the pillars of light ignite and build the space in one reveal: the stage, the Legion battlestation, the silhouette. Hand-painted TEAM ANNA KEY and NIL-EGO LIVES signs in the crowd, fans who treat a game like a stadium sport. Because for this audience, it is one.
The whole environment is prevized and locked with our post partner before the shoot, so what we light on the day and what gets built around it are designed together, not stitched together afterwards. This is the one moment the film goes big-room cinematic, and it's earned: three stories climbed here. The stage light is the payoff of every desk lamp before it. And the room is dressed the way a real event of this size would be, down to the hand-made signs, the sponsor screens and the gear on every desk.
One production design language across all of it: authentic first, but cinematic. Real places come with years of lived-in detail and insight no art department could fake. That is how faithful we want to be in our approach to art direction, to locations, and to this world as a whole.
One frame of fake kills the film.
Gamers watch 40 hours of gameplay a week. They know exactly what a game looks like, how it moves, how it feels. The moment our game world looks like an ad pretending to be a game, we lose the entire audience. So we build it like a game, with people who play.
Real UI, real physics, real logic. Health bars that behave like health bars. Hit feedback that lands. Anna Key's anti-grav ray follows game rules, not VFX rules: the mech ragdolls the way physics engines ragdoll, slightly broken, deeply funny. Ragdoll comedy is a genre the community loves, and we're using it on purpose.
Every gamer knows the moment a game cuts from gameplay to a pre-rendered cinematic. The light changes, the motion smooths out, the truth leaves the room. Our in-game world stays on the gameplay side of that line. Game-logic camera, in-engine feel, the grit and texture of something being played right now. Cinematic comes from the framing and the story, never from polishing away the game.
The size mismatch is the joke, the personality gap is the story. A colossal mech with a fragile ego. A warrior with one absurdly overpowered move. We treat their scene like a scene: staging, timing, comedic beats. And we light and grade the game world with the same eye as the live action, so both halves of the film speak one visual language.
It's been cool to hear Lenny has become a fan favourite and a brand mascot, so we give her the best seat in the house, in and out of gameplay. A mascot doesn't need lines. She needs a moment the community will clip, loop and meme by lunchtime, and a plushie of herself sitting on Sam's desk back in the real world. If you know, you know.
The popcorn is my favourite, but it isn't the only way to play her, and how far Lenny steps into the action is worth deciding together. We've put a few alternatives next to the boards in Beat 01: Lenny riding on Anna Key's shoulder, Lenny with an absurdly oversized sniper rifle, and Lenny hitting a full in-game emote at completely the wrong moment. Each one shifts the joke a little, and each one is easy to build. Let's keep chatting about Lenny's involvement.
This half of the film lives or dies in prep. I board very specifically, so we previz the full in-game sequence and lock one route with our post partner before the shoot, not after it. Everyone renders toward the same target from day one. Lenny's cutaways are boarded and prevized with the same care as the boss fight itself: one location, two shots, zero seconds stolen from the story. And as a gamer, I sit in the middle of that conversation, client, agency, post. I speak both languages, and I'll be the most annoying quality check in the room.
You can't act 3,000 hours of gameplay.
The most expensive mistake this film could make is casting actors who hold a mouse like it's a prop. Our audience has watched thousands of hours of real players: streamers, teammates, themselves. They know what focus looks like at hour six of a session. They know the micro-flinch of a lost clutch. None of that can be performed. It has to live in the person, so we cast from the community and its orbit, not the catalogue.
Stylish, charismatic representatives of Gen Z. Fresh faces, not the usual casting-database rotation. People with a real relationship to gaming, who know the community and its world from the inside. Interesting personalities with strong, expressive faces, comfortable in front of a camera but never performing for it. People who can simply be themselves, because themselves is exactly what this film needs.
He feels everything at full volume. Every defeat is the end of the world, every victory is the best day of his life, and his face broadcasts it all one second before he knows it himself. He's the friend you want watching your game, because his reactions are as entertaining as the game. When he rips off that headset, the whole audience has been him. And when he walks onto that stage at the end, they're all walking with him.
She loses the match, but wins the film. Where everyone else sees defeat, she sees a way through. There's a particular kind of knowing intensity we're after: the person at the party who's half-listening because their head is already elsewhere, already building something. Her whisper, "no, seriously… how did they do that?", is the smallest moment of the film and says so much. It's the sound of curiosity switching on.
Max falls in love easily, with a character, a craft, a challenge, and then gives it everything. Burnt fingertips, 3am deadlines, an apartment full of foam dust: that's what devotion looks like in Max's world. Her face watching that trailer is pure emotion, childlike wonder on an adult with power tools. Max comes from the cosplay community itself. Not an actor playing a maker, a maker playing herself. Anything less and the community sees straight through it.
I wasn't sure at first whether Max should be a man or a woman, and honestly both work, but a woman feels stronger here. The cosplay community is largely built and led by women, so a woman with a heat gun and a foam sword nods to its real, pre-existing audience. It also balances our trio: two women, one designing, one building, neither of them the sidekick. We're open for discussion either way!
We treat every supporting role with the same care as the lead. Alex's friend delivers the laughs. The cardboard cosplayer delivers the emotion. And the crowd is made up of real fans, so every cheer feels authentic.
Shot to be screengrabbed.
This film has to look premium and feel real at the same time. Not addy. A piece of cinema. Cinema craft wearing streetwear. Rich, textured, atmospheric images with imperfections left in on purpose: a little grain, a little flare, light that behaves like light. Our audience lives in an over-polished, filter-smooth visual world, so the fastest way to earn their trust is to look like nothing else in their feed. More cinematic than content, more honest than advertising.
of the action
The camera work is where this film flexes. Action-packed, dynamic, impossible to look away from, camera language borrowed straight from gaming itself: replay orbits, spectator-mode dives, the sudden snap of a hard-scope. Whip pans stolen from a yanked laptop, crash zooms triggered by a falling cardboard wing, long dynamic takes that ride the energy. Every move is designed to be eye-catching and immersive, the kind of shot that makes you feel the game instead of watching someone play it. We keep a breath of handheld and a few human imperfections so it never turns sterile. But make no mistake: this is epic filmmaking with a controller in its DNA.
The toolkit stays varied on purpose: motion control for the moments that need surgical precision, Steadicam for the flows, classic handheld for the truth, and the switches between them are a rhythm of their own. Just when the eye settles into one language, we change it. That variety is how sixty seconds keeps surprising: the audience never learns the pattern, so they never stop watching.
We start small. Screens, desk lamps and workshop practicals light the early scenes with an intimate, grounded feel. As the story opens up, so does the lighting, building towards the scale and spectacle of the arena. The final stage lighting feels bigger, and it’s earned, because we’ve been expanding towards it from the first frame.
Contrast and depth over brightness and anything too safe or plastic. Blacks that are actually black, highlights that bloom like screens really bloom, colour driven by the worlds themselves: RGB spill, monitor cyan, workshop amber, arena blue-white. The game world gets its own heightened version of the same palette, bolder and more saturated, unmistakably a game, so both realities rhyme without matching. The grade brings everything together without losing its character.
Foam dust in a light beam. Fingerprints on a screen. Condensation on an energy drink. The audience can’t consciously name why a frame feels real, but they know it when they see it. We shoot close, we shoot tactile, and we let the worlds stay a little dirty. Real places, real materials, real light: that’s the look.
If you know, you know.
Two layers of humour run through this film. The surface layer needs zero context: things break, fall, short-circuit and explode at exactly the wrong moment, and anyone laughs. The deeper layer is written in the community's native tongue, jokes that land if you've spent your life in game lobbies. The first layer makes the film work. The second makes it relatable to the community.
The brief asks for comedy that doesn't lean on dialogue, and that's our instinct anyway: every gag lands visually, in one frame, with no setup needed. A mech ragdolling with zero dignity. A glue gun scalding. A whole apartment blacking out. A cardboard wing giving up on cue. You could watch this film on mute in a feed, which, let's be honest, is where half the audience will watch it, and every joke still works. Sound makes them funnier.
Some of the funniest things in this film are reactions: the plushie that doesn't react at all, Lenny's popcorn mid-standoff, the half-second of pride before the wing drops. And we protect the beats in the edit: a gag that needs a breath gets a breath, even in a sixty-second sprint.
The community layer is built for the rewatch and the comment section: patch numbers ticking up across the film, character_FINAL_really_final_v67, the MK.III blueprint, TEAM ANNA KEY signs in the crowd, a thumbnail that looks suspiciously familiar. None of it interrupts the film. All of it rewards attention. The first viewing entertains. The second one recruits. Give a community things to find, and they'll do the distribution for you.
One line we don't cross: we laugh with our heroes, never at them. Sam's rage is lovable, Max's scalding is endearing, and even the cardboard cosplayer gets his dignity back two shots later. In this community, everyone's been the noob. The comedy remembers that.