One year after getting Ryan Reynolds’s approval for their ad for his Aviation American Gin, Kelowna’s One Peak Creative has produced another ad for a Reynolds-owned company — this time, using audio technology to digitally reconstruct his voice.
One Peak’s recent ad for Mint Mobile, a telecommunication company that Reynolds has partially owned since 2019, stars one of the production group’s co-owners, Conar Fair, crash landing somewhere in the Arctic and stumbling across Reynolds alone in a desolate cave making cell phone calls with ease.
The catch, however, is that it isn’t Reynolds who has his back turned to the camera in the ad, who can be heard listing off the benefits of using Mint Mobile. Rather, it’s One Peak’s co-owner and videographer Glen Jackson filling in for Reynolds’s figure.
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And with the help of various audio programs, the production group was able to digitally recreate Reynolds’s voice.
“That’s actually just an amalgamation of a bunch of other ads and interviews that he’s done,” said Jackson. “We had fun with that.”
But the challenge wasn’t recreating Reynolds’s voice. Instead, Jackson said it was creating the fully computer-generated (CG) Arctic environment in 24 hours, which was made possible through a technology called Virtual Production Hub.
“It’s actually using something that was previously just a gaming engine for creating video game environments,” said Jackson. “It’s getting to the point where it really stands up to a lot of the CG work being used right now.”
The ad was just one of many created for One Peak’s #adsolation campaign, which has seen them make one ad every day.
“In 2020 when the pandemic started, we started doing a campaign where we would make an ad in 24 hours from start to finish — shoot, edit, release,” said Jackson.
While Reynolds told the group that he didn’t know whether to hire them or kidnap them following the release of their Aviation American Gin ad, he has yet to respond to the group’s Mint Mobile production.
“Because he’s local, we’ve always had a dream to do a project with him. We’re hoping that one of these days, we can get him out here,” said Jackson.
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@aaron_hemensaaron.hemens@kelownacapnews.com