MAGNUM

Magnum, The Crack is a self-directed spec commercial, a product-only cinematic for an existing brand rather than a brand I built from the ground up. Like the Pepsi spot, it's art direction and filmmaking rather than a full brand build, this time in a completely different register: dark, macro, photoreal indulgence.

Magnum's whole brand rests on one sensory moment, so I built the entire film on it.

Magnum is one sound: the crack of a thick chocolate shell breaking under the first bite. That is the brand. So the film has exactly one job, make you feel that crack in fifteen seconds.

In a black void, a slab of chocolate fractures in ultra-slow motion, reveals molten caramel and velvet ice cream, then reassembles and settles over a mirror pool of molten chocolate.

Dark indulgence, shot like a jewel. Molten chocolate, warm gold, velvet texture, frost breathing off the shell, deep black all around it. Everything slow, everything macro, so the material does the talking.

It's the inverse of the neon Pepsi world, and that was the point: run the same pipeline into a completely opposite look and see it hold.

Product-only, no actors, no set. The hero is the bar itself: the chocolate shell, the caramel core, the vanilla centre. I started from a clean multi-angle product sheet, the bar on white with the cross-section, so the anatomy was locked before anything moved.

The whole film grew from one still. I generated a single hero keyframe, the fracture you see as the film's poster above, at its peak, and fed that one image to the video model as the only reference. The black-void world and the molten pool were set as a text descriptor and a lighting plate.

The branding stays IP-safe the same way as the Pepsi spot: it travels through the keyframe image, never the prompt, where the product is only ever "a chocolate-coated ice cream bar". The Magnum logo and the True to Pleasure line are a post overlay.

Pulled from the cut as stills.

Built through Higgsfield. Nano Banana Pro for the product sheet and the keyframes, the fracture, the environment plate and the end-card, all in the same dark-indulgence look. Seedance 2.0 for the video, one image per call, so that single fracture keyframe carried the whole generation.

A fast, cheap probe first to check the motion read, then a standard-quality master. Product-only meant no character sheets to wrangle, so the discipline was all in the lighting and the timing of the crack.

This is the picture-locked master. The finish is post: the Magnum logo and the True to Pleasure end-card as overlays, and the sound design, the creak, the crack, the caramel pull, the final echo, mixed with no music, because the crack is the music. The film is done; the polish is the last mile, same as the rest of the studio.