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Some Japanese companies are known for making really clever commercials, others are known for making some really dumb commercials (looking at you Sony).

Mobile carrier au (pronounced “A-U”) has proven itself a part of the former camp with its fantastic new commercial, “FULL CONTROL/Xmas”, which shows what Tokyo might look like if it were turned into one giant night club.


http://youtu.be/r_2Mma6Oomw

The commercial advertises au’s new 4G LTE high-speed wireless communication service. 4G LTE is designed to provide up to 10x the speeds of 3G mobile networks and AU plans to have the service available to 98% of Japan by March 2013.

The advertising campaign for the service is called “Making surprise the standard”, and the commercial takes a look at what might happen if we could control the sights and sounds of our cities with our smartphones. Somehow we doubt that reality would be as inspiring a picture as the one this commercial paints— I know the first thing I would do with this technology is Rickroll Shibuya Crossing— but it’s still a sweet 60 second clip.

And in case you were wondering, no, they didn’t actually fly a giant disco hot air balloon over Tokyo— though it’s not exactly CG, either. According to the video description, an actual hot air balloon and search lights were used and it took nearly 20 hours in the studio to get the angels of the lights just right.

AU is also uploading a series of three videos showing how they made the commercial, the first of which you can check below (the other two haven’t been released at the time of this writing):

http://youtu.be/PMyznul_nBA

And here, we’ll embed the video below again in case you want to, you know, watch it one more time.

http://youtu.be/r_2Mma6Oomw
[ Read in Japanese ]