Indie sci-fi movie Robot & Frank is built around a somewhat messed-up premise: Buying a robot companion to take care of your aging father when you're not around. Even though such care-bots aren't available (yet), director Jake Schreier created a vaguely creepy faux ad campaign to market the mythical machines.
Robot & Frank, which hits theaters later this month, is a study in how much we can or should rely on mechanical helpers. Schreier's debut film stars Frank Langella (Frost/Nixon) as Frank, an aging one-time cat-burglar whose adult children (played by Liv Tyler and James Marsden) give him a VGC-60L robot that ends up helping Frank with more than just an enema.
Then Schreier asked his friend Justin Ouellette, who created the futuristic user interfaces seen in the film and now works for Tumblr, to post them on a flashy page built around Ouellette's popular Tumblr theme.
Schreier, who previously directed commercials, also got some tough-love creative input from Ouellette.
A couple dozen ads have been made for the Robot & Frank Tumblr — see the first four in the gallery above — and new images will roll out up until the film's release.
Schreier said he hopes the faux ads will make the idea of robot helpers accessible to potential moviegoers, but also cause people to question just how comfortable they would be around such machines — much the same way as the fake "Happy Birthday David" commercial for Prometheus got people thinking.
Robot & Frank, rated PG-13, screens in select cities later this month.