Yasuo Kanemaki

Getting to work on this project was decided through a presentation called a “Planning competition”. Competing advertisement companies each submitted their drafts, and the client [Nintendo] then decided which one to go with.

The plan was, rather than making a game commercial, to create a trailer for a science-fiction movie, and I personally made an homage to old American SF movies, such as This Island Earth and the like.

When we were planning the commercial, we played the game that was loaned to us by our client, and we understood the contents of the story from that.

We have been given the character designs, and we’ve deliberated on the materials’ textures, the movement, voicing, Samus’s footsteps among other things. As for the space research facility, we’ve built a plan while taking the design of the game prologue’s screen into account. The casting was left for us to do, and then we got the green light.

It was in a movie studio in Tokyo. I believe it was in February of 1994. I remember it being very cold.

We also took a lot of cuts that were not used in the commercial. I do also know of the fact they were used in the promotional video.

We went by hiring a pyrotechnician and getting the relevant permissions. For budget reasons, we’ve only made Ridley’s leg grasping the capsule, and his full body was supposed to be a silhouette projected onto the set. In order to project that silhouette, we have made the shape out of plywood. What had caught on fire was that plywood that was being hung on the roof of the studio, and the reason was small particles of dust – resulting in a dust explosion. The small powder that we made to infer the collapse of the laboratory had absorbed oxygen and caught on fire. The fire was immediately put out.

I do not know their names. It was not made by someone on set, but I rather seem to recall it was arranged by the people in charge of music for the game. [Kenji Yamamoto and Minako Hamano]

The props and the figure were handled by different teams. After filming had ended, the figure was taken to the company responsible for stop-motion filming, and the props were taken to the special modelling company. For about a year, keeping them was mandatory, but I do not know what happened after.

Being a space research laboratory setting, I thought that the featured characters would of course be from various nationalities. There are Japanese actors as well, though it might be difficult to discern. As for Samus, I selected her while giving importance to how nice her style was, and her giving off an impression of a tough athlete.

I do not know the name of the actress, I forgot. (But even if I knew, without getting her permission I wouldn’t be able to reveal her personal name.) The woman playing Samus is a model. Actually, my first choice was somebody else; she had a slightly prettier face, and I thought it would be a nice gap between her hard movements. However, due to a mistake from her agent she wasn’t able to appear, so I settled on my second choice. Though a different kind of positives emerged from her own cool factors. Her way of running was especially great. However, I thought that the image of Samus people playing the game would be different, so I made her face look a bit more like a silhouette, made the cut short, and left the rest up to imagination.

In order to not betray the figure of Samus from within the game’s screen, I made her into a stop-motion animated figure. If you were to make a costume out of the Power Suit, there would be a lot of builds involved, and considering her waist, I believe the image of the finished product would have been very different. The budget would have also been higher for a costume when it comes to such quality.

I’ll combine both questions in my answer.

What I want to point out is the Baby Metroid’s sculpture. Making a three-dimensional representation of a 2-dimensional character was a challenge. Even though I did not put in the effort myself, rather the special sculpting staff did that, when I first heard about the movement and texture from the client, I wasn’t confident about it.

Something with translucent skin, having something resembling guts and fangs, all while making a jellyfish-like movement within a liquid.
With those specs, there was no way of making effects from within the moulding. The only way was to manipulate the soft material with transparent threads.

I couldn’t check its completion until the day of filming, but I was deeply impressed the first time I saw it. It was akin to seeing a lifeform from outside of this world for the first time. However, with such a lifeform made out of silicone, if you kept moving it inside its liquid, the materials would melt, and the wires used to move it would get loose, making us unable to move it anymore. We filmed alongside repairing it, but the time limit from pouring the liquid in was 20 minutes. I had wanted to take many cuts of this fantastic model, but we ended up taking the minimal amount of needed shots and called it a day. You couldn’t make a picture of it in the finished commercial, could you?

One additional thing was, flexible art props and filming I thought up to make budget savings. The main visual of the Baby Metroid’s research equipment was properly made, but the laboratory surrounding it was made out of a large panel of walls with several sci-fi movie style decorations that were assembled in front of the camera according to the cut. For the long shot of the laboratory as a whole, the studio’s flooring was used as-is, and we’ve placed the lighting equipment’s wiring on there intentionally to be seen as if it were part of the research equipment itself. The walls were also the actual studio walls, all while those aforementioned panels were laid out to create depth. We then reused those same panels to also film Samus’s base and the suit transformation booth. We did manage to save up on the budget, but the most important thing is so that the viewer does not look at it and think it’s a cheap-looking set. It’s all about how you can broaden the viewer’s imagination by using such expressive techniques without having to spend money.

I am very happy that the Super Metroid commercial, despite being 30 years old, is still being appreciated. As you can see, it was a work of passion by everyone involved.

If you all like it, don’t forget it and remember it from time to time!

“If men forget about the things they used to love, then it is all over”

– Maxim Gorky, The Lower Depths