OnePlus 12 Campaign Celebrates a Bygone Era of Authentic Imagery

With the recent explosion of generative AI, authenticity in visual content has all but deteriorated into nonexistence. Instagram filters, beautify apps, generative fill, text-to-image artwork… you can hardly browse a feed without scrolling past some deformed figure with perfect skin and thirty-eight fingers.

The AI revolution is inescapable and for many of us, especially in advertising, that’s all well and good. But last year, Samsung learned the hard way that we can’t just slap generative imaging into any application without public backlash… Since 2020, Samsung has touted the “Space Zoom” feature of its Galaxy cameras with incredibly detailed photos of the moon. After a few clever users debunked their claims of authenticity, Samsung was slammed by The Verge for misleading people when, in fact, the phones were utilizing AI to produce details that were never there in the first place.

So it seems brands will need to tread carefully as they continue to weave machine learning into the fabric of their products. Photographers, especially those with a passion for the natural world, take the authenticity of their work very seriously.

In the wake of Samsung’s fake moon fiasco, Chinese smartphone manufacturer OnePlus seized the opportunity to showcase the capabilities of its latest OnePlus 12 camera in a genuine #RealMoon campaign. Sporting 3x optical zoom and a 64MP sensor that enables up to 120x digital zoom with incredible detail retention, its new Hasselblad camera is a powerhouse for telephoto imaging.

Global production house Vantage Pictures teamed up with wilderness landscape photographer Joshua Cripps to produce a series of moon photos that would dazzle viewers with impressive detail never before seen from a smartphone camera—a brave endeavour on OnePlus’s part, no doubt. Cripps was free to make colour, contrast and exposure adjustments in Lightroom but under no circumstances could the images be composited or manipulated in Photoshop.

In honour of the tedious process required to capture unaltered lunar imagery, the team at Vantage Pictures proposed a longer-form behind the scenes documentary in addition to the 30-second spot. Executive Producer James Duong said, “We felt a single hero spot wouldn’t be enough to convey the core messaging. Because it wasn’t just about showcasing the end result of the camera specs. We wanted to celebrate the enormous workload that astrophotography demands, which is so easily undermined by digital manipulation.”

Cripps and the production crew spent over three months testing prototypes, battling weather during short full moon intervals. OnePlus also wanted to include a human element, so the moon alone was not enough. Positioning a climber in front of the moon is no easy feat… Weeks of scouting, tracking lunar phases, calculating distance between subject and camera for various focal lengths—all of which needs to align at a precise moment so the sun illuminates the landscape without overexposing the sky. Not to mention the scant 20-minute window where the moon is low enough to remain in frame.

The end result is a striking hero spot that blends anamorphic footage of Cripps in the field with enigmatic CG renders of particles coalescing into features of the moon. Shot in the Alabama Hills of eastern California, jagged granite spires produce an otherworldly look that beautifully supports the campaign’s extra-terrestrial theme.

Director Zacharia Lorenz said, “I was sweating bullets just days out from shooting. We were still wrestling with prototype bugs and deliberating locations, trying to piece together some semblance of a story that was unfolding into a logistical nightmare. But as soon as Josh took us out for a pre-scout, all the stars aligned. I was blown away by the location, our crew was small but nimble, and the obstacles we had to overcome really paved the way for a potent behind the scenes story. It was the kind of experience that reminds you to trust the process and find solace in the struggle.”