The brief
Ads for our own studio. Two 30-second vertical spots that sell GiveMePrompts by doing the thing we sell: keeping a thumb still on a phone screen for longer than it meant to stay. No product shots and no talking head. One object, one thing about to happen, and a reason to watch to the end.
They belong to a planned series of five hooks: the press, the crack, the match, the last block and the wrong countdown. THE MATCH and THE CRACK are the two that are finished.
What we made
- THE MATCH. A match about to light, framed like a high-speed macro camera, counting down the frames to ignition. It ends on "DM the word LIT for a free ad idea"
- THE CRACK. A bullet meeting phone glass, with the distance to your screen ticking down. It opens on "Whatever you do, don't move your thumb" and ends on DM CRACK
- Both are 1440 x 2560 at 24 fps, 720 frames, exactly 30 seconds, with sound
- One shared structure: the hook, a line about how long you have been watching, a reveal that the object is made in code, a phone mockup that puts your brand in the frame, then the call to action
- A custom texture set for the realism pass: 16 material prompts written across the five ads, 8 of them processed into full material sets (colour, roughness, height and normal maps at 1024 x 1024)
How it works
Every hook is a promise with a timer on it. The match counts frames to ignition, the bullet counts millimetres to the glass, and neither pays off on schedule, so you keep waiting. Around seven seconds in, the ad turns and talks about you. The "watching" counter and lines like "You just gave a matchstick 7.5 seconds" are written into the film. They are a creative device, not a measurement of anyone's watch time.
Then the reveal. A wireframe pass shows the match and the bullet as 3D models with the line "Made in code". From 15 to 21 seconds a phone mockup plays the same shot with a placeholder "yourbrand" mark, which is the pitch: this could be your product. The last few seconds are the end card and a one-word DM, so a reply tells us which ad earned it.
The textures were made flat and straight-on, then made tileable in code, with the roughness, bump and normal maps derived from the colour image. That is why the wood, the copper jacket and the stone hold up at macro framing.
What we threw away
The first cut used smooth shaded surfaces. The reference frames we kept from it show a match with no wood grain and a bullet with a plastic sheen and no machining marks. At macro scale a smooth surface gives the trick away, so that look went and the textured masters replaced it.
The texture set has one rule: any image that comes back with lighting, shadows or an object in it gets redone flat. Baked-in light fights the light in the scene.
Limits
- Our own ads, not client work. They have not been posted yet, so there are no view or reply numbers to show.
- The "watching" counters are scripted on-screen copy, not data.
- Both ads have four single-frame dark flashes in the phone mockup, at frames 422, 439, 466 and 492 (about 17.6, 18.3, 19.4 and 20.5 seconds). Each lasts 1/24 of a second and darkens part of the phone screen with banding. They may be part of the glitch transition, but they have not been confirmed as intended, so the loop and stills on this page come from outside that stretch.
- The phone mockup carries a placeholder brand. A client version puts the client's product in that frame.
- Three of the five planned hooks are not finished.
