IDD 400 Analysis of 'Lenovo Thinkpad - Long Life'

This week is the analysis of the Lenovo Thinkpad - Long Life commercial done by Motion Theory. The overall point of the commercial is to show that this laptop has a long battery life. The commercial starts with lid to the laptop opening in an office setting. While it is opening we see in the background the light changing to dark and things flying by very quickly. As the background flashes and comes back in we see a dark rain forest type of setting. There is then a cut transition and it shows the corner of the laptop with the Intel Centrino logo and a centipede crawling over it with vegetation in the foreground. Then the background seems to "woosh" forward almost like we are traveling in time and we see a butterfly in the foreground. The butterfly is shown in only a few places as if that the current type of video footage is more of a time lapse video, and looks like something we would see in a documentary on the Discovery Channel or something. Along that same time lapse sequence we see a vine grow and over come the laptop. It isn't your normal time-lapse footage, however, other parts of the footage are smooth such as the camera's rotation.

Then winter seems to come into season and we snow and ice start to form and then there is a gust of snow that is used as a transition to move the camera to a closer location. Occasionally the camera won't be a smooth movement and it will seem to jerk back a tiny bit to a previous location and then continue on. All of these effects really help to get the point across that there is a lot of time taking place. The scenery continues to change a couple more times until we are brought back to the original office setting and the lid to the laptop closes like it is the end of a work session. A voice then comes over saying, "Epic battery life...yadda yadda yadda" and the screen fades to black. There is then a simple white sans serif font saying what model laptop we're looking at and then we see the appropriate logos afterwards which are very typical of all commercials like this.

The color palette is dark and has a feeling that the person used this computer in the middle of the night. The audio is music with sound effects that move quickly to correspond with the feeling that there is a lot of time going by. My only complaint at the moment is that this website was horrendously slow.