A Dubai-based firm's futuristic take on the city is making a splash on YouTube, the video-sharing website. With the overdramatic lines and booming voice-over of a Hollywood-style movie trailer, "Dubai 2010" is designed to show off the vision and abilities of the post-production company Rolling Thunder, its managing director said. "We wanted to do something in-house to show clients what we're capable of doing as a company and we were kind of talking about doing something with the futuristic Dubai look for quite a while," Henrik Friberg said.
Existing buildings such as the Jumeirah Emirates Tower, Burj Dubai and the National Bank of Dubai in Deira are interlaced with a variety of imagined skyscrapers. The video ends with a shot of an island created to look like the company's logo. The two-year-old, five-person firm has created similar animations for Etisalat, the Dubai Mall and other local brands. The video was created in between work on other projects since December, relying on inspiration from the emirate's most distinctive buildings and spacecraft from popular science-fiction fare such as Star Wars and Star Trek.
"Dubai is developing so fast. It doesn't have spaceships, but it's not that far-fetched either," Mr Friberg said. After the video was uploaded to YouTube last week, it initially received little attention. As of Wednesday evening, it had only 100 views. But blogs such as Gawker Media and Ad Blog Arabia began showing the video, pushing it to above 3,000 hits by last night. "We're very surprised by the reaction," Mr Friberg said. "We wanted to send something to our friends about a movie trailer, but I think people have been passing on the links. Over the past few days it's exploding."
dgeorgecosh@thenational.ae
