Carousel is an online advertisement launched in April 2009 by Philips to promote Philips Cinema 21:9 LCD televisions. The 139-second (2m19s) piece is a continuous tracking shot of a frozen moment after an armoured car heist gone wrong, with robbers dressed in clown masks holding a pitched battle with police officers inside a hospital. The campaign surrounding Carousel was led by the central Philips team at DDB in London and produced by advertising agency Tribal DDB in Amsterdam. It was directed by Adam Berg, with production contracted to London-based production company Stinkdigital. The ad went on to become a huge critical success, winning the advertising industry's most prestigious award: the Grand Prix at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival. It is only the second online advertisement to win in the Film category, after Dove's Evolution in 2007. Scenes from Carousel were used in the music video for hip hop artist 50 Cent's single "Ok, You're Right".
Sequence
After a credit sequence, Carousel opens on a police officer kneeling on a parked police car. The camera pans across and travels past an armoured car in mid-explosion. It continues to the entrance of a hospital, where two officers are engaged in a firefight with a criminal in a clown mask, while a further two are dragging a clown out of a station wagon. The camera passes into the hospital to a reception desk, where a clown is kicking an officer through a glass window while others come up behind him. The camera rotates upwards to reveal another clown/officer pair in midair after falling from a balcony above. The camera travels up to the second floor, through an explosion into a corridor filled with clowns and officers, with several civilians cowering against the floor. Passing a ward where more figures are shooting at each other, the camera reaches a clown carrying a sack of cash who has just been shot in the back, before panning right to reveal a team of officers surrounding a man stripped to his underwear. The camera exits the window and returns to ground level, to the pointing officer on the car (revealed to be number 219) at the start. It scrolls past the officer, who hides a clown mask and a sack of cash, revealing that he is in fact one of the criminals. The piece then begins a fresh loop from the beginning.
Production
Background and filming
In January 2009, Philips announced its new Philips Cinema 21:9 line of LCD televisions, promoting them as being the first production television whose proportions matched that of a cinema screen. To inform consumers about the product's features, Philips collaborated with their central agency team at DDB in London and advertising agency Tribal DDB in Amsterdam with a request to create an advertising campaign based around an educational website The team assigned to the campaign knew that many, many variations on "real cinema experience" advertisements had been tried in the past, and quickly came up with the idea of a piece composed of a single tracking shot. The team proposed the idea to several production companies, eventually settling on London-based production house Stinkdigital. After consultation with Stinkdigital about the possibility of having the tracking shot move through a frozen moment in time, the team brought on director Adam Berg, who had produced a similar advertisement for JC Jeans in 2006.
Working together with Stinkdigital executive producer Mark Pytlik, Berg began brainstorming ideas for the piece in February, including car chases and bank robberies. Eventually, they settled on the concept of a robbery gone wrong, with the clown-masked robbers escaping through a crowded hospital. The brief created, the team began scouting for locations to shoot the ad. Several hospitals in Prague were looked at, but with a recent outbreak of influenza in the Czech capital, most were unavailable. To speed up the location scouting, director of photography Fredrik Backar and post supervisor Richard Lyons accompanied the recce teams. Eventually, the team discovered an old Communist university which had been converted into a sports college, and gained permission to dress the location as a hospital.
An animatic was assembled exactly matching the proportions of the chosen location, though the action itself was made up by Berg as he went along. Tribal DDB had a schedule of seven weeks from the pitching to the end of post-production, and assigned two days for shooting the film itself. A crew of more than a hundred people was assembled for Carousel. The 60-strong cast of extras mostly comprised Czech dancers and stuntmen, who had the muscle control necessary to stay sufficiently still for the extended filming sessions.