Crumb Lucky Break:
Alert Today, Lucky Tomorrow

We made a fintech spec ad, so there was no client and no brief. We wanted to make the money video we wish existed, while pushing the studio’s creative and production boundaries.
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The premise is the well-known one: luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. Luck probably isn’t in any bank’s compliance vocabulary. We didn’t know, and we didn’t check, because we wanted to pretend there were no rules. To be real: luck is a huge thing in finance, and we thought, ok, let’s explore that.

A lot of us don’t really understand money, and because of that, a lot of us take a happy-go-lucky approach to it. What’s a better cliché for happy-go-lucky than a surfer? So we built the story around one: a stiff figure who loosens up as the video progresses, lets go, and returns home changed, informed, and ready to deal with the financial side of life. The idea being that with enough information, luck becomes more likely.

We gave ourselves one rule: the character is a plastic figure with a single painted expression. All the emotion had to come from posture, movement, and what happens around him. Partly that’s the point, since a blank face is easier to see yourself in, and partly it’s production thinking. If you can make people feel something without a heavy facial rig, you can tell a lot more stories, faster.

That’s the story part. The other reason we made it: we thought a gazillion coins splashing and making waves could look satisfying. The obvious challenge was technical: simulating rigid coins in an organic, flowy way. Scenes crashed, a lot. In the end we only simulated the falling coins, left the ones under the character static, and leaned heavily on motion blur to sell it. It worked, we hope.

Money is mostly confusing. We’d love to see financial brands talk about that more. Read Less