The Underdogs
Award: Yellow Pencil
Yellow Pencil / Direction / Film Advertising / 2020
Award: Wood Pencil
Wood Pencil / Film Advertising / TV Commercials over 120 seconds
Award: Shortlist
Shortlist / Casting / Film Advertising
Award: Shortlist
Shortlist / Film Advertising / Writing for Film Advertising
A motley crew of scrappy office employees have just 48 hours to turn a scribble on a napkin into a polished business presentation, to pitch a revolutionary pizza box idea to their intimidating CEO. The good news is they have Mac, iPad, Apple Watch and iPhone to help them beat the deadline and escape their grey, Tungsten-lit cubicle maze.
What did the judges have to say?
It’s almost perfectly executed in terms of all the things that put it together, if it’s the casting, the cinematography, the genre, the editing, the production design, the music, the whole thing comes together so beautifully… It’s very important sometimes not to feel the effort of crafting something.
Adi Halfin, Director, Lief
Personally, four works grab me by the collar more than others, on different levels. It's all simple ideas with perfect, simple executions, where the magic happens. Great talent makes complicated things look easy: Hope is Power for the Guardian, Wise Words for Comic Relief, Storm the Court for Reebok and The Underdogs for Apple. These works provoke intimate, related, unexpected emotions, and show great ability in creating narratives. Just perfect. You don't feel there's any extra or missing frames from the story. The craft attached to these projects attends to one of the most significant criteria for an award like D&AD. It moves the industry towards the future, where narratives will catch people's attention, as they have since stories were painted in walls and told around the fire.
Ricardo Jones, Director, Stink Films London