We wanted to show the beauty in ThinkPad and its durability, so our idea was to romance moments of duress. From concrete stairs, to drops, to liquid nitrogen, fire, dust, and liquids, we used Phantom Camera techniques to play with tension, and demoed ThinkPad under extreme stress.

The Stress Tests break the mold of typical product durability demos by focusing on beauty, design edge, and emotion. We created hyper-real studio environments and built tension through extreme slow motion and sound design.

Each film used real working products that functioned throughout the entire tests. There was no CGI used, and each set-up represented a real test performed by actual engineers, shot in a single take.

The Stress Tests are ThinkPad’s take on durability demos—introducing a new visual identity and proving once again that “Different is Better”.

The execution focuses on a reductive yet highly-designed environment. The iconic engineering aspects of the products and set contrast with real-world elements (a hammer, stairs, a fan and water-filled vase) to show how these devices are more than durable enough to withstand life’s toughest challenges.

ThinkPads uses red and grey as it’s primary colors while green and blue playing more of a secondary role. This was reflected in the set design. Grey was used and backdrop to the red objects highlighting these as both our impact moments and focal point of each test.

We started by taking a traditional durability test and reduced it to its simplest form to conduct it with no visible human interaction. Partnering with engineers, storyboards were then made into working experiments. From there we added in the Thinkpad visual treatment culminating in a completely unique Stress Test.

We introduced a new design language for expressing durability across ThinkPad’s line of devices. We reinforced the product claim that only ThinkPad features the most durable products without sacrificing design. We got consumers/buyers to rethink the level of design potential within product demonstrations and reimagine the applications of in-house durability tests as content. We firmly positioned ThinkPad as outside of, and unique to, the rest of it’s competitors.

All without reliance on voice-over or placement, in a format that could scale across platforms, languages, and market relationships, which still communicated feeling and elicited emotion.