I’ve been seeing this new ad from Coinbase these past few days and love it. Made by independent agency Isle of Any, this spot has on-point animation, a banging track, and a great concept that plays with the Blue Screen of Death.

I found this one article about it from Little Black Book:

“Crypto is fundamentally updating the financial system," says Toby Treyer-Evans, co-founder of Isle of Any, speaking with LBB. "So, to us it felt like an interesting place to start for the campaign, both as a film idea and as a way to play with the viewer and send a message. When you see it on TV, in the context of other advertising, it’s deliberately arresting… and blue being Coinbase’s brand colour is just one of those lovely coming togethers.”

James Poniewozik, writing for The New York Times:

Whether they work in sand or spores, heavy-handed metaphor is the true material of choice for all these opening titles. The series are different in genres and tone. But all of them seem to have collectively decided that the best way to convey the sense of epic event TV is with an overture of shape-shifting, literal-minded screen-saver art.

His point is that a recent trend in “prestige TV” main titles is to use particle effects. Particle effects—if you don’t know—are simulations in 3D software that produce, well, particles that can be affected by gravity, wind, and each other—essentially physics. Particles can be styled to look like snow, rain, smoke, fireworks, flower petals, water (yes, water is just particles; see this excellent video from Corridor Digital), or even Mordor’s orc hoards. This functionality has been in After Effects for decades in 2D but has been making its way into 3D packages like Cinema 4D and Blender. There’s a very popular program now called Houdini, which does particle systems and other simulations really well. My theory is that because particle effects are simpler to produce and workstations with GPUs are cheaper and easier to come by, these effects are simply more within reach. They certainly look expensive.

Anyhow, I love it when mainstream media covers design. It brings a necessary visibility to our profession, especially in the age of generative AI. The article is worth checking out (gift article) because Poniewozik embeds a bunch of videos within it.