Apple’s New Five-Hour iPhone Ad Takes Viewers on a Dreamy Tour of the Hermitage Museum in Russia—See a Clip Here

Most ads run 15, maybe 30
seconds. The newest ad for Apple’s iPhone 11 Pro is more than five
hours long.

The premise is to take viewers
on a dreamlike tour of one of the world’s largest museums, the
Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia. Recorded in one single take, the film meanders
through the 45 halls and 2.5 million square feet of the Hermitage,
showing off some 600 works by Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Rubens, and others, as
well as staged visitor scenes, custom choreography, and a set by
Russian composer Kirill Richter. 

“This video to me is all about
connection through time,” says the 29-year-old Russian filmmaker
behind the ad, Axinya Gog, “art that is timeless meets modern life and
state-of-the art technology.” (The director is no stranger to museums. Her
mother was an art historian
and curator at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.)

Though ultimately played as a
stunt to showcase the new
phone’s battery capability, the length and single-take style of the
film also demanded some impressive behind-the-scenes technical
wizardry. Gog and her team
rigged an elaborate system to seamlessly move the phone from
handheld camera stabilizers to room-scanning cranes, and even
designed a custom app to command the video controls
remotely. 

The video was shot on a Monday,
when the museum is closed to the public. Though planned and
rehearsed over the course of months, the film crew was given a
single six-hour window to make the five-hour ad, meaning there was
no room for mistakes. And when they were done, there was still 19
percent of the battery left on the phone.

See the full video
here.

The post Apple’s New Five-Hour iPhone Ad Takes Viewers on a
Dreamy Tour of the Hermitage Museum in Russia—See a Clip Here
appeared first on artnet News.