Samsung Shoot Ad With a Billion Colours

How many colours can you name? If you just got stuck somewhere around maroon, you might not be ready for R/GA's new ad featuring one billion colours.

That's right! Red and green and chartreuse and periwinkle blue and yellow and burnt umber and cerise and puce and...well. 999,999,992 other colours. You get the idea.

To achieve this for the commercial, directed by Bruno Aveillan with production Believe Media and Quad Productions, the agency developed a special algorithm for tracking and replacing colours in film. Learn more about this and the other elements of this ad, a 'high-speed journey through Paris from the point of view of a ray of light as it races through the city at dawn' in the case study video and interview with R/GA's associate creative director below:

Oriel Davis-Lyons, Associate Creative Director at R/GA

What was the brief for the ad from Samsung?

The brief from Samsung was to launch their new QLED TV. A television that used Quantum Dot technology to display one billion colours.

But in a market cluttered with claims about picture quality and we knew we couldn’t just make another ad about colour.

How did you manage to get one billion colors into the ad?

First, we had to find a way to count the number of unique colours in a piece of film. But, as no one has ever attempted to do something like this before, we had to build the technology we needed from scratch. We started by developing an algorithm that counted the number of unique colours in a piece of film and index each one against a billion colour database. This allowed us to see how many colours were present and also how many we were missing.

During this process, we discovered that, as a film moves through the post-production process and rounds of compression, it actually loses colour data, thereby reducing the overall number of colours in the film. So, to ensure we could reach one billion in our spot, we modified our algorithm to be able to restore the colours that were lost through the post-production process. We did this by finding colours that were duplicated throughout the film and replacing them with the nearest colour value. This restored the dynamic range, richness and colour quality that was originally captured in camera and brought the total number of colours in the film to just over one billion.

How long did the tech take to develop?

The software took about 5 months of development.

One billion colours seems like a lot. How does that compare with the average advert?

We ran tests on various pieces of film during the development of the algorithm and we found that while different pieces of film have different numbers of colours (from 150 million to 400 million), none of the pieces of film we tested came close to one billion, which means that as television technology advances, the content we’re displaying on them is using a fraction of the screen’s colour potential. The algorithm we developed will allow film makers and post-production companies to change that and use these new screens to their fullest colour potential.