With touch screens, apps and search engines firmly entrenched in everyday life, the product demo is enjoying a major renaissance in the world of advertising. The “how” is often more important than the “why” in campaigns for new tech and mobile products, meaning creatives and commercial directors must dream up new and interesting ways to show us what exactly it is these new-fangled gadgets do.

To launch search giant Google’s new Chrome web browser, BBH, New York and Glue, London took an analogue approach with Features, a series of seven short web videos demonstrating its perks using an array of handcrafted contraptions and old-fashioned camera tricks.

“The challenge is to make a product demo that says something about the brand and its flavor,” says Pelle Sjönell, creative director at BBH, New York. “Usually, product demonstrations are very techie and glossy and sometimes complicated. We wanted to make it very simple and easy to understand, but also very lo-fi and human.”

With Features, the creatives at BBH embraced Google’s open-source ethos and willingness to accept imperfection and aesthetic simplicity.

“Google is a company that makes very complex things very simple to use,” says art director Steve Peck. “So we used the way that Google already works as a way to communicate their product.”

For 1st Avenue Machine director Aaron Duffy, that meant foregoing animation – 3D, 2D or otherwise – in favor of a single-shot, in-camera approach. Sjönell and his co-creative director (and brother) Calle Sjönell had floated an open-brief asking for handmade ideas, so Duffy pitched a series of visual puzzles rendered through a variety of crafty materials, including mercury, dominos, a hammer-powered slingshot, paint-filled balloons and crocheted blankets.

“I love to crochet – it’s one of my main hobbies,” says Duffy. “If I could, I’d move to Paris and crochet.”

Thus, in one film, a crocheted blanket resembling the Chrome homepage unspools to reveal a knitted YouTube interface behind it. The camera pans over to the tagline, “Shows the websites you visit most often every time you open a new tab.”

Duffy and a crochet artist spent two weeks making the blankets, which measured just over five by four feet. On the shoot day, the first take was slightly off, so he had to stop shooting and crochet the blanket again for a second take. The in-camera nature and tight turnaround – eight set-ups, three days – meant that each film had to be meticulously planned out and in a few cases, Duffy only had one take to get it right.

Shooting in 1st Avenue’s New York studio space, Duffy decided against art directing the background to give the films a workshop feel.

“A lot of the art direction comes from the way things had to work,” he says. “I’m not personally good at making things look beautiful and I was happy not to have to worry about that. The quirkiness and the craftiness come from the realistic movement.”

In the film explaining how Chrome “shelters your computer from malicious websites”, for example, pointy pens and pencils rise up in a laptop façade and pop paint-filled balloons representing viruses. To show how “crashed tabs won’t crash your browser”, Duffy and designer Carlos Ancalmo placed dominos atop three browser windows. When a game of Pong depicted in one freezes in shrink wrap, the other two windows remain unaffected.

Camera wires and lights are visible in the background of each shot, as is a harpist who provided a live soundtrack during filming.

Two days before the shoot, the creative team decided on harp music and wanted a strong, yet odd melody that could be riffed on in a live setting. Composers from Human Worldwide wrote melodies and the creatives chose “the weirdest” one by Craig Deleon, who had no prior experience on the harp.

On set, the harpist would do a dry-run, speeding up or slowing down depending on the take. Though some music was scored to the ads in post, the harp’s presence and the live approach come through in other ways: Deleon mic’d the harp to capture the sound of the player’s fingers plucking the strings and left the ambient sound from the room untouched in the recordings.

All of these creative choices, he says, make the films’ music – much like their art direction – serve the analogue concept and make Features ideal for viewing on small screens.

“Most people aren’t going to be watching this on a big, hi-fi, flat screen and stereo surround sound so they’re not going to hear the full range of the harp and the bass,” says Deleon. “I chose to specifically aim for the higher frequencies, which is where the finger plucking aspects of the harp are heard.” Q

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