Durability,
Style, & Accuracy
are hallmarks of a fine timepiece, whether it’s online or on your wrist.
When we were approached by Hamilton to support their newest partnership with a leading games developer, you can imagine our excitement.
Ubisoft and Hamilton have banded together to create a watch that exists both in the new and highly anticipated Far Cry 6 game, and in real life.
Gamers are not only able to enjoy the story of Hamilton’s military heritage, but also experience it. What’s more, the watch would be available for fans to buy and wear in the real world, to play out their fantasies.
To bridge the digital divide between the gaming world and the real world, for Hamilton, this partnership was the perfect match. Far Cry 6, with its plot surrounding warfare, resilience and rebellion, and Hamilton, a brand with roots in the military. Introducing the limited edition Hamilton Khaki Field Titanium Automatic.
The Brief
Our job was to create a campaign that would run alongside the release of Far Cry 6, drawing on the hype that had built up for years about when the game would eventually drop. We also wanted to show fans how the watch featured in the game, promote the aesthetics and convert that excitement into desire to purchase it in real life.
We needed to harness the rebellious nature of Hamilton and Far Cry in a way that both fit the in-game narrative, and also gratified the real life marketing objectives.
The Challenge?
Although they both shared a similar story, we needed to stay true to our primary objective of promoting a real watch, rather than the game, with a very specific visual criteria. Bridging this gap between ‘gaming trailer’ and a ‘brand film’ was always going to be tricky.
Despite sharing the same energy, working to make a film that fulfilled the objectives of two very different products was always going to have its issues. For instance, we couldn’t use a male character wearing the watch in our film as that went against the Far Cry 6 narrative, but it would be something that risked alienating our male target group.
The Work
We created a launch film
that was designed to inject a real and genuine presence of the Khaki Field amid the buzz of the Far Cry 6 pre-launch hype.
Far Cry 6 animated clips were blended carefully with close ups of 3D visualisations of the watch itself.
We realised that to grab the attention of our viewers, we needed to contextualise the partnership in five seconds. We therefore open with a sequence of gunfighting, hand to hand combat and beautiful scenery.
Moreover, we wanted to ensure we were telling the story of the watches existence in the game: to help you survive. Within our film, we show our main character, Dani, going on an adventure through air, water and earth to defeat a dictatorship, all with her trusty Hamilton watch front and centre frame, helping her survive.
The result was a mix of thrilling clips of our main character wearing the watch in daring action scenes like car chases, bowhunting, and flying fighter jets to ensure the watch was centrally visible on their wrists.
As for the watch itself, we created 3D visualisations of the model to add tension and pressure. The close-ups were delicately considered to best naturalise the real Khaki Field’s presence and narrow the artistic gap between the real-life shots and the animated clips.
The Result
The conclusion was an exciting and cohesive trailer promoting both the Khaki Field Titanium Automatic watch and Far Cry 6. Collecting 180,000 viewers overall, our film and its short-cut versions were released on Hamilton’s Youtube, Instagram, Facebook, and website pages before the successful launches of both the game and watch.
On top of the launch video, we were also given the opportunity to edit a Behind the Scenes video featuring interviews with Ubisoft’s game content director Omar Bouli, and narrative director Navid Khavari who explain the background behind the partnership and how it worked. This was posted on Hamilton’s Youtube page and received over 60,000 views.
