Hasta La Creative!

How would you feel if, during high-tension moments in your favorite movies, the cameras cut to slow motion and the lead actors turned to stare right at you?

Now you might find out, thanks to a new campaign by from Fox Entertainment’s movie channel, FXM. Production company Imaginary Forces took key frames from films that are slated to air on the network, and then used 3-D animation techniques to manipulate the characters’ faces so they’d be looking at the camera.

The 10 spots, which are 20 seconds each, are loosely tied together under FX’s “Fearless” positioning, which the behind-the-scenes video says allowed Imaginary Forces to “get strange” in its approach to teasing the network’s programming.

Some of the cuts are more effective than others. Daniel Craig’s scene from The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is particularly eerie. Will Ferrell’s from Step Brothers is particularly funny. None actually captures fear quite as well as Kevin Bacon’s in X-Men: First Class. Jesse Eisenberg’s in The Social Network might take the cake for most creepy (or maybe it’s just the whole idea of Facebook ruling the world that’s still unsettling).

Regardless, it’s a nifty experiment. As for whether it’ll make you want to watch any of the movies again—let’s just say Bruce Willis’s character in the Sixth Sense is still dead.

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CREDITS
Client: FX Networks
Designed and Produced by: Imaginary Forces
Creative Directors: Tosh Kodama, Peter Frankfurt
Art Director: Dan Meehan
Executive Producer: Ben Apley
Head of Production: Claudina Mercado
Producers: Terry O’Gara, JJ Gerber
Designers: Tosh Kodama, John Kim, Ryan Massiah, Kina Choi
Junior Designer: Wes Yang
Design Intern: Ryan Massiah
Animators: Dan Meehan, Kina Choi
3D Model Builders: DeAndre Moore, Jamin Joseph-Lackie
Compositors: Orlando Costa, Sam Cividanis, Ben Hurand
Editors: Ryan Hensley, Kina Choi
Illustrator: Alejandro Lee
Inferno Artist: Rod Basham
Photographer: Ryan Speers
Coordinators: Nicole Zschiesche, Dominick Guglielmo
Copywriter: Kyle Barron-Cohen
Music Company: Easy Feel
Composer: Mark Share

How do you market an animated comedy about a horndog spy? Duh—post ads on a NSFW Reddit forum, where tons of young horndogs in your target demographic are hanging out all the time anyway.

FX series Archer did just that to promote its upcoming fifth season, taking to the 18+ GoneWild subreddit with a series of banner ads designed to look like nude (if modest) postings from the show's characters, with taglines like "My first post. Who wants to play?" They might be the most clever pseudo-native ads ever. The only real surprise is Archer's team didn't think of this earlier. Via Esquire.

It was a mixed bag for TV generally in 2013, but not a bad year for TV promos—in fact, some of the most inventive ads on the dial (or the Web) were from folks promoting new or returning shows.

For the most part, good marketers eschewed parades of "Our show is so great!" quotes, cliffhangery snippets of dialogue and trying to unironically mimic movie trailers—and just let a few powerful images, or sometimes a single powerful image, speak to the viewer. Sometimes it was a clever in-joke, sometimes a stylish montage, sometimes the sheer chutzpah of the idea. But we picked 10 of the promos that wowed us the most from a surprisingly large pool of good creative.

From edgy cable fare like Archer to a broad network series like Community, there was plenty to love before the show even started. Tell us what you think (and what we missed) in the comments.