 I remember when I saw the script for the first time, just seeing how positive and how fun and exciting it could be. It was just, it was one of these ads that I just knew was going to be just a really fun experience. My name is Tonya Lusser, and I'm the head of production at Matesa Coffer, and I'm also an associate partner. I'm Veronica Saran. I'm a product marketing manager for Pokemon Go at Niantic. My name is Steve Yedlin. I'm Ryan Johnson's regular cinematographer. I was also the colorist and the color grader vendor. How long did it take you guys to go from the initial concept of the ad to the fully completed spot? The concepts first came to us as a collective team in a brainstorming session middle of May, and the commercial launched on July 6th on TV in the US and the UK. It was a very fast timeline. When we got into speaking with directors, we didn't even go through a treatment process. It was, it was almost live pitching, which was really exciting, and we got to talk to some really incredible people. But we did a call with Ryan Johnson, and it became really obvious that he was the guy for the job. When did you get in contact with him, and why was he such a perfect fit? Ryan joined the team, I think, about a week to two weeks after the original concept was pulled together. Not only is he a star-studded director who's directed a lot of my own favorite films, but he is a Pokemon Go fan and player himself. It was a joy to kind of watch and collaborate with him on the vision in terms of taking what was on paper and then how, you know, he helped us elevate that. In its original form, it was a family tearing down the walls around them, almost like wallpaper, as they're discovering the world of Pokemon Go. But when Ryan joined the team, he changed the treatment to be much more about tearing back a layer of reality, as you see in the commercial now. And that was much more effective for two reasons. One, it's much more visually appealing and cinematic. Two, it more accurately portrays what augmented reality is in the vision of Niantic and the Pokemon Company. Ryan's one of my best friends and, you know, he just called me up and said, I got this interesting thing, you know, would you want to do this? And I said, you know, I mean, for anything with Ryan, I'm going to want to do it anyway. So I'm going to split this up into pre-production, production and post. And let's talk a little bit about how each of them differed from a normal project, knowing that everything would have to be done remotely. Well, I think pre-production was the most different of the three stages in a lot of ways. We did keep the amount of talent to a minimum, what kind of locations we were thinking about. It differed in a lot of ways. Not only because this whole thing was done remotely, but because we had a much more shortened time frame to do this all on. So all these different parallel tracks were happening at the same time in a six week period when you would usually have six months for something similar. Like, you know, I've talked to my regular sales rep at Panavision who has a bunch of clients doing stuff like this and ours was very different. Some of the people that are doing this truly the one DP is not there, which is different. So I was actually, most of my prep was spent testing and figuring out how we were going to do this sort of uplink stuff. Let's talk about the actual shooting days. I saw your picture of your desk and everything. So obviously it was a wild and interesting experience. Could you walk us through what that was like? Sure. I mean, this was a global, both global and scale in terms of our clients and global and scale in terms of where all the production partners were. I mean, there was like a big map for every meeting because we had so many clients and so many time zones. The actual shoot was over the course of the weekend. It was 14 hours in total. We had folks from all over the world on a Zoom chat, but then also using other software in order to see what was going on on set and on the camera. All of this was centered on a shoot that was happening in New Zealand. And so the actors were in New Zealand. There was a director, a DP in New Zealand. Everybody was communicating with each other live over the course of the entire weekend in pretty much every major time zone in the world. If you see that picture, so we had our client video village, which was one Zoom phone call. We had the agency sort of village, which was a separate Zoom call. And then we had a whole text chain between just the line producers who then was communicating with Ryan and Steve and the onset, you know, AD and the crew that was in New Zealand. I mostly just had the meeting that was Ryan and AD and the producer and then Nigel, the DP. I had these two separate things. The biggest thing for me is I kind of always had to be able to to some extent to be able to hear Ryan if he had notes. But I couldn't be distracting him with every time I'm talking to Nigel, he hears me. You know, part of the set experience is being able to hear the director talking to the talent and talking to the crew. So we made sure to rig up a microphone so that we could hear Ryan giving direction to the crew. Why did you guys decide to go the route of shooting, you know, a real cinematic ad rather than doing something completely virtual or completely animated? Real people use use this game and enjoy the game and an animated experience wouldn't really give you the same feeling. The most important thing with any marketing that we do for Pokemon Go is to show our game authentically in the real world. Even when we're putting together images of Pokemon in the real world, we're literally designing art, showing them in the world around us. What would you say the pros and cons of doing this sort of production art? We're in a creative business and creativity is it's looking each other in the eye. But it's also that the physicality of being with somebody and, you know, I think we'll see remote shooting will be around. And there's certain projects, you know, where it lends itself. It was a unique opportunity and a unique reason to get everybody on the same page, literally on the same zoom at the same time over the course of a weekend. I do treasure those moments where I do have the opportunity to connect with my teammates around the world for a whole weekend. That's awesome. Would you say there are any pros to working this way? And would you do it again? I mean, I definitely do it again. I mean, it was, you know, it was a cool job. Yeah, I don't know if there's pros. I think it's just that the cons aren't as con as you might expect. Like, okay, it's okay. So I don't really see it as an advantage. I just see it as the disadvantage isn't as big as it might initially sound. I do think it's important that we take chances creatively and we work with new people. And I think, you know, we have to all kind of be, I think, a little brave and kind of push ourselves, you know, even though there are production challenges and there are all kinds of things happening. You know, we couldn't, there's no way we could have done this without having great relationships. And it was an amazing experience for me.