China has over 560 million hard-core online gamers who invest in various gaming PCs of different brands. That was a challenge for Dell that consumers were spoilt by many choices with similar high performance product specifications. We needed to make Dell Firelord 7000 product stand out among our target audiences, making Dell Firelord 7000 a product they would consider to purchase.

To demonstrate the high-performance of the product features, instead of the conventional and functional communication approach, we created a long-format animated video to express the product features through rich story content. We created a long-format digital video content and to reach out to our target audience who were the hard-core online gamers, we collaborated with the all-time favourite classic internationally-renowned game IP “Street Fighter” and created “Spiritual Soul” as the main theme of the video.

Implementation, Placement, Scale, Brand Relevance

We found the most impeccable collaboration with internationally-renowned game IP “Street Fighter” that not only was it a perfect match to express the theme of game ‘Spiritual Soul’, but it also well-highlighted the high performance of the Dell Firelord product.

Dell was the only brand in the 3C market in China to collaborate with Japan’s Capcom Co., Ltd., with full usage rights for each Street Fighter elements including characters, scenes etc. completely given to Dell by Capcom. This was the first time that Japan Capcom released its usage rights as part of this exclusive one-of-a-kind partnership model.

With the final animated video lesser than 2 minutes, we also embedded the video into a mobile experience page and released it on WeChat. Its opening page which was designed to look like a loading page acted as a quick teaser showing dialogues among people around the topic of mundane life routine. Then the call-to-action to get users to ‘Activate the Spiritual Soul with Street Fighter’ was brought into the conversation, that triggered users into the viewing the full animation.

Materials, style elements, design choices, Methods and process

The overall production was completed with 3D modeling. The facial expressions, emotions and inventive movements for both the Street Fighter characters were specially created and vividly-enhanced to capture the essence and soul of the story and to demonstrate the power of Dell’s Firelord product.

We also used motion capture technology with directions from professional martial art instructors to capture the live movement for each character especially in the short fighting scene with 20 seconds duration.