Five Minutes
“Is it a brilliant zombie film or clever interactive branded content? Both!”, wrote trade magazine Horizont. FIVE MINUTES is an interactive zombie film for watch brand G-SHOCK — over four million clicks from nearly 200 countries and numerous awards, including the prestigious FWA Site of the Month and Site of the Year.
A brand in search of a thrill
G-SHOCK’s brand core can be described as “resilience”, “toughness” and “indestructibility” — associated with experience, adventure and a thirst for action. To examine the target group more closely, an online questionnaire was developed: genre affinities, media use, evaluation of previous zombie media and brand perception via a semantic differential.
The result: G-SHOCK was seen as reliable, adventurous, modern and robust — but only moderately exciting, innovative and premium. The goal was therefore a genre-specific, transmedia architecture that would add innovation, excitement and premium appeal to the brand’s canon of values.
Five minutes against forgetting
To reach the media-savvy target group, we opted for an action-packed interactive short film that blurs the line between zombie game and branded short — built entirely as a web app in HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript, playable without installation on any tablet, laptop or desktop.
The concept: the first symptom of infection is memory loss. Protagonist John fights for survival after being wounded in a struggle with a zombie — he and the viewer have only five minutes. Only those who help John concentrate and hold on to his memory get to see the film in full. If the viewer fails, so does John.
Award-winning, award-winning, award-winning
More than four million clicks from nearly 200 countries — and a packed trophy cabinet: FIVE MINUTES won the German Digital Award in the “Branded Content” category, the Shocking Shorts Award and was named “Short of the Week”. Add the FWA “Site of the Day”, “Site of the Month” and the audience award “Site of the Year”. Playable at fiveminutes.gs — no app installation required.
The crew
Managing director Jonas Kirchner realised the project together with Maximilian Niemann (director), Felix Faißt (producer) and Christopher McKissick (camera) during his studies at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg — with David Brenner and Philipp Mooren (UI/UX, interactive art direction), Tonia Hochsieder (production design), Jascha Viehl (sound design), Daniel Brenner (music) and Fabian Gustus (editing).
