When crypto company Coinbase decided to create a commercial for the Oscars, they didn’t take the easy route. Instead of relying on computer-generated imagery, they hired British film director Oscar Hudson to build a real-life video game — on actual sets, with real people, using practical effects. The result is a stunning piece of filmmaking that has left audiences and filmmakers alike questioning what they’re actually seeing. In this in-depth interview, Hudson walks us through every creative and technical decision that brought this extraordinary commercial to life.
The Central Idea: Building a Video Game in Real Life
The brief was ambitious: show a man breaking free from the simulated world of a video game. For most directors, the obvious solution would have been to start with CG and blend into live-action. Hudson rejected that approach immediately.
“I do know how you slide the slider from real pretending to be CG to real,” Hudson explained. “I don’t know how you slide it the other way.” His instinct was that the only authentic way to transition from a game world to reality was to build that game world physically — so that the transition itself could be genuine rather than manufactured in post-production.
But beyond practical reasoning, there was a deeper storytelling motivation. Hudson wanted the main character to carry humanity even while trapped inside the video game. By building the game world with real people wearing real (if intentionally wrong) costumes, that human quality was baked into the film from frame one — hiding just beneath the surface of the uncanny, flat aesthetic.
The Guiding Principle: Print Everything Flat
Almost every design decision in the film flowed from one underlying principle: take detail, print it flat, and put it back onto surfaces. Whether it was faces, shop windows, signs, or suit lapels — everything was rendered two-dimensionally and applied to real objects while being subtly down-rezzed to evoke the look of a game texture.
The suits the background characters wore weren’t made by tailors. They were designed by someone thinking like a video game designer — with intentionally wrong proportions, misplaced shoulder seams, and oddly sitting lapels. All the surface detail (buttons, ties, collar lines) was simply printed flat onto fabric smocks. The result is something that feels deeply off without the viewer being able to pinpoint exactly why. That’s the uncanny valley working in service of the story.
The same logic applied to the arrow floating above the main character’s head — an icon straight out of game UI language. In reality, it was nothing more than four pieces of yellow Perspex glued together, lit from the edges using LEDs. Because Perspex behaves like a fiber optic cable, light travels along its edges and creates a glowing, three-dimensional shape. For close interactions — smashing through glass, hitting the floor — the physical prop was always used to capture that real physical dynamic.
Video Game Reference: The Getaway
When it came to choosing a visual and tonal reference, Hudson’s team settled primarily on The Getaway, a GTA-style game set in London. What made it perfect wasn’t just its gritty urban setting — it was the color palette. Despite being a grey, desaturated world, the game is surprisingly colorful beneath the surface, with purples, oranges, and off-tone reds embedded in the concrete textures. Hudson’s team replicated this quality deliberately: a world that feels digitally assembled, where the color calibration is slightly wrong, the scale is off, and everything sits just outside the bounds of reality.
The Main Character: Humanity Inside the Machine
Casting and movement were critical to making the protagonist feel like a real person even within the game world. Hudson worked with choreographer Maeva Berthelot to develop a movement vocabulary that felt simultaneously human and game-like — drawing on game motion research while deliberately avoiding copying any single game directly.
The lead actor, Arthur, came from the Jacques Lecoq school of physical theater in Paris — an institution Hudson returns to frequently for movement-based roles. Lecoq performers bring a quality of character and sensibility that’s distinct from traditional dancers: expressive, physical, and deeply human even in the most stylized contexts. That humanity came through even when Arthur was wearing a flattened, printed version of his own face stretched over his actual face.
The Camera: Isometric Angles and a Flatbed Truck
Hudson made an early decision to use an isometric camera angle rather than the more familiar GTA-style follow-behind view. It felt harder to achieve, more novel, and more visually striking — a genuine video game perspective that most online imitators skip over in favor of the easier option.
Achieving that angle at speed proved far more challenging than anticipated. For the opening street sequence, the solution was elegantly low-tech: a giraffe crane mounted on the back of a flatbed truck, driven by a precision driver who rehearsed the character’s movements and tracked alongside them at running pace. Minimal post-stabilization was needed. When a drone was suggested, Hudson dismissed it — drones don’t perform reliably, and dressing a miniature set for a drone’s perspective would have been an operational nightmare.
The “Reality Run”: The Centerpiece Shot
The film’s most complex shot — what the team called the “Reality Run” — begins 10 meters in the air in the locked-off, isometric game-world perspective, then slowly descends, zooms in, and transitions into raw, handheld human camera movement as the character sprints through a transforming environment. Sparks fly. Smoke fills the air. The world becomes messy, tactile, and real.
Executing this required a wire cam rig with an operator physically riding it — necessary because the handheld quality couldn’t be faked with a stabilized remote head. The studio set was 75 meters long almost wall to wall, leaving almost no room for a vehicle to decelerate, which ruled out large vehicles. The wire cam solution allowed the camera to start high, move fast, come down to ground level, and stop without smashing into a wall.
The cut between the studio and the location exterior — the transition into the flower market — landed most naturally not on a column (the expected wipe point) but on the character’s body movement, hidden within the chaos of foreground elements whipping through frame. The production designer reverse-engineered the studio set to match the location exactly, building matching columns and a covered roof to make the cut seamless.
The Miniature Boardroom
A standout sequence features the character in a boardroom where the actors and table are full-scale — but the entire room surrounding them is a miniature. The printed windows show a two-dimensional skyline. The edges of the miniature set are visible if you look carefully. Hudson embraced this: imperfection, he argues, is a profoundly underrated creative tool — it’s what makes a thing feel human.
Lighting a 100-Meter Video Game World
The cinematographer Ben faced one of the most unusual briefs of his career: light everything completely flat, with no shadows. To achieve even, shadow-free light across nearly 100 meters of set built across two different streets, the team commissioned custom-made 30×30 meter silk diffusers — they simply didn’t exist at that scale and had to be manufactured specially. Ben, who is also an accomplished rock climber, rode the wire cam rig himself during the Reality Run, wrestling the camera by hand while flying down the street at 20 miles per hour.
The Schedule: Five Days of Shooting
The entire commercial was shot in five days — three and a half in the studio, one and a half on location in Cape Town. The set build took three weeks, with designs approved in rolling stages because the deadline left no room to wait for full sign-off before construction began. The edit was completed in approximately five days total, with the editor working from the set during production and continuing immediately after the shoot wrapped.
| Phase | Duration | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Materials Testing & R&D | ~2 weeks | London |
| Set Build | 3 weeks | Cape Town, South Africa |
| Studio Shoot | 3.5 days | Cape Town studio |
| Location Shoot | 1.5 days | Cape Town streets |
| Edit & Post-Production | ~5 days | Cape Town + London |
A Human Response to a Digital World
Many viewers have interpreted the commercial as a deliberate statement against AI-generated content — an aggressively handmade piece of cinema at a moment when artificial intelligence is reshaping visual media. Hudson doesn’t claim that was the explicit intention, but he finds it a satisfying reading: if AI is making our reality, this is the humans making computer reality — turning the tables and demonstrating the irreplaceable power of craft, ingenuity, and human touch.
For Hudson, the most fertile creative ground has always been the crossover between digital and analog technologies. This commercial is perhaps the most literal expression of that philosophy he has yet put on screen: real hands, real sets, real imperfections — all in service of an illusion that most audiences assumed only a machine could create.
Key Takeaways
- No CGI was used to create the video game world. Everything was built practically on real sets in Cape Town, South Africa.
- The core design principle was to take complex surface detail, print it flat and two-dimensionally, and apply it back onto real objects — faces, suits, signs, and environments.
- The isometric camera angle was a deliberate choice over the more common GTA follow-cam, achieved by mounting a giraffe crane on a flatbed truck driven alongside the actor.
- The main character’s arrow was a physical prop: four pieces of yellow Perspex glued together and edge-lit with LEDs.
- The “Reality Run” centerpiece shot used a wire cam with a live operator riding it, traveling from 10 meters in the air down to ground level in one continuous motion.
- Suits were printed, not tailored — designed with intentionally wrong proportions to mimic how video game characters’ clothing looks subtly off.
- The primary game reference was The Getaway, chosen for its desaturated-yet-colorful palette and cinematic lack of UI overlays.
- The boardroom sequence combined full-scale actors with a miniature room set, deliberately leaving visible seams as an intentional creative choice.
- The entire shoot was completed in five days, with a three-week set build and a five-day edit, all in service of an Oscars air date.
- The film has been read as a defense of human creativity in the age of AI — something built entirely by human hands to simulate what machines typically generate.