Nedbank Celebrates Sustainable Growth in Unexpected Connections Spot

The new-look spot for Nedbank Corporate and Investment Banking (CIB), 'Unexpected Connections' portrays Nedbank’s powerful connections that bring about sustainable growth in unexpected ways, from upscaling communities to literally saving lives.  

Together with the team from Joe Public, Slim from Darling Films embarked on a non-conventional approach for this project which required a mixture of live action and found footage, cutting edge Post-techniques and specialist title animation brought together by skilful editing, sound and motion design to create a unique unexpected television commercial unlike anything we have seen in the business banking sector. 

To launch Nedbank CIB’s new positioning of ‘When you see unexpected connections, you see sustainable growth’ Slim selected specialists in their fields for various sections to make up this dream team of collaborators. 

Chocolate Tribe explored a new technique to re-construct and envision an economically viable and expanding city of the not so distant future. A method called 'Gaussian Splatting' which enables real-time 3D rendering of scenes extrapolated from Digital footage. 

The mission involved filming cityscapes on-site using drones and then reconstructing the urban landscape using a calculated Gaussian Point cloud. This pioneering approach offers a novel avenue for cityscape reconstruction. To represent the urban future-projection Slim chose Pretoria for it’s solid cityscape base, deep background elements and space in which to animate growth. We captured multiple angles to inform the city’s reconstruction. 

With the model assembled from the dataset, Chocolate Tribe seamlessly integrated our Futuristic City, using 3D VFX techniques, Bridging traditional Workflows with innovative Methodologies. 

The result effect speaks volumes, heralding new horizons for world-building and 3D Scanning technologies.

Darling approached Inka Kendzia, projection artist and designer to handle the Road infrastruction section of the edit. To create a fly through and in essence time-lapse showing road network Construction from rural dirt roads to Flyovers, Inka made use of LiDAR Scanning technology. Capturing various locations for data for the LiDAR Point Cloud ((raw set of points derived from the Lidar Pulses which are returned to the sensor)  enabled us to create a seamless composite of this data. 

“Exploring mapping techniques like LIGHT Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) in this artistic interpretation vs the usual archaeological and architectural applications is exciting and ground breaking” said Inka Kendzia. 

Editing was handled by WILLIAM KALMER from Post-Modern, who spent long days and nights working  with the most evocative footage we could source and combining titling and sound tracks in an ever evolving 'War Plan edit' which then enabled Slim to work on shots to capture that elevates the emotion and  edit whilst communicating Nedbank’s important deal intrinsics. 

Louis Minnaar, fine artist, digital designer and commercials director was approached to handle the entire on Line process as well as all the titling animation. 

The attention to detail applied to all the visuals and techniques mimics the similar detailed approach taken by Nedbank for these investment deals.

Working heavily with pre-visualisation through stock footage in the pre-production period allowed the team to pinpoint the emotive moments that would benefit most from a traditional film shoot- be that a storm swept boat created in a parking lot or a time-lapse of ten years of success in a morning. 

With so many found, captured and created elements all needing to work in concert, the success of the spot relied on Slim’s ability to be a conductor- to use each true storytelling element and gifted contributing artists  to the best of their strengths, always keeping the final product, a novel communication in the banking  sector, in clear view as the layers added up and to not succumb to the convenience of traditional  advertising tropes.  

The process was all consuming as it all relied on recreating actual events in a manner that delivered a documentative approach for each deal’s authenticity. This required scouring hours of footage that was not  only authentic to the very specific scenes, but also leant itself to creating an emotive connection to what are inherently financial outcomes. 

Bringing all the contributors together to achieve the final result was thanks to an unwavering team with SLIM at the helm, who constantly adapted, rolling with the punches throughout this ever-evolving, organic  process, due to the untraditional requirements.