Lg2 & Olivier Staub: Try to unsee this mobile phone use

Have we become immune to shock in road safety commercials? Try not to feel the horror of this one. It’s the repetition of the accident. It’s seeing the driver filming the accident. It’s the eerie stillness of the accident that stay with you. That was the idea of great Guns director, Olivier Staub.

The film was created by Canadian agency, Lg2, for SAAQ (Société de l’assurance automobile du Québec), to highlight the danger of using a mobile phone while driving.

The campaign was shot entirely through still images as Staub wanted to explore an entirely new direction. He chose not to shoot in a traditional high frame rate, instead recording a large amount of detail in each photographed frame. To push the loop of accidents into infinity, he kept the layers of story independent with a mix of photography, CGI, traditional retouching, composition, and 3D mapping.

He commented, “I chose to use the idea of a ‘screen within a screen’ to emphasise the never-ending risk posed by mobile phones if people continue to act recklessly. I didn’t want the advert to look like a slideshow, so we shot every necessary angle and perspective in order to reconstruct an animated 3D environment in CGI, preserving all the organic perspective and focus changes.”

To achieve the dynamic shots, stunt performers were required to bounce from a small trampoline and project themselves into a sheet of plexiglass. Staub noted, “What a shoot! Our amazing stunt performers were insanely talented. I want to make a special shout out to Robyn, an incredible older stuntwoman who fearlessly projected herself into 3-inch plexiglass – what a performance! I also want to highlight the great work of Boulevard’s Sylvain Roux. His unnerving sound design added the final but essential layer of drama to the film.”

The campaign launched across SAAQ’s digital channels.