Deleting your loved ones off of your camera roll to free up space on your phone is pretty barbaric if you think about it… luckily with iPhone 15’s storage, you don’t have to.

With greater storage come greater photo libraries. But not everyone knows that. The idea came about that the photos could inform an iPhone 15 user themselves. This then developed into the photos begging for their lives as an unwitting iPhone 15 user prepared to delete them.

In the past, iPhone users who are running out of storage, tend to cull their photo libraries in order to free-up space. It's become second nature to delete duplicates, to cut down a series and to lose entire swathes of older memories to make way for the new. With more storage, you can hold on to everything.

To showcase this, we wanted to depict a photo roll choir singing like their lives depended on it. After much searching for the perfect passionate swan song, we landed on Terrace Martin’s cover of PJ Morton’s “Don’t Let Go” before even reaching out to directors. We could have stopped there, but we took it much further to make it look, sound, and feel as emphatic as we could.

We worked with Mr Talkbox, famed Talkbox session musician and producer, to rework his arrangement within Terrace’s cover for our :30 story arch - new tempo, new call and response background vocals and a lyric change (added in the word “me” to the hook with PJ and Terrace’s approval just to make the stakes a bit higher in the story.)

We wanted to capture all the charm and personality of the lip-sync performances in camera and super impose those on the photos instead of relying on CGI. This required extensive rehearsals with each cast member to make sure they knew the song backwards and forwards as well as conducting / vocal direction on-set to nail the riffs - as many quivering chins and expressive lips as possible! We combined all of the footage in the edit and, after what felt like a million frame nudges, we had a full choir!

The ad was viewed 26M times on YouTube even though it was posted organically only (no paid media.) Grammy winning musicians like James Fauntleroy, Rapsody, and Robert Glasper chimed in with their love for the ad on social media.