“Rock, Paper, Scissors” is a brand film that illustrates Android’s brand promise, “Be Together. Not the Same.” It achieves this through an animated story told with heart and humor about being together despite your differences.

Using a combination of 2-D and 3-D animation, puppetry and live action, we created a visual narrative where three inanimate objects—Rock, Paper and Scissors—are envisioned as deeply human characters who, instead of fighting over their differences, bond over them.

Set to the song “St. Elmo’s Fire (Man in Motion),” the film begins on the first day of school. Paper arrives scared and friendless, surrounded by nothing but scissors. He spots some other sheets of paper and tries to befriend them. They respond by bullying him. An unlikely ally comes to Paper’s side—Scissors. Their friendship strengthens when they stumble upon Rock getting teased by other rocks. Paper defends Rock, and the trio walks off triumphantly.

The film was shot by Conor Finnegan of Nexus Productions, who employs a very unique animation style to create a visual narrative that feels authentic and human. The biggest challenge was to take what is basically a set of nondescript hand gestures from a well-known playground game and turn each of them into distinctive characters of a new narrative, all while remaining true to the original inspiration. We achieved this by creating each character out of its real materials (e.g., Paper is actually a piece of paper). The characters were then shot in live action while being controlled by puppeteers. The eyes, arms, legs and mouths were added in post production to really bring each character to life.