Apple's Lovable Co-Workers Manage WFH Chaos in Amusing Short Film

The comical 7-minute return of 'The Underdogs'

In April, Apple released a lovely meditation on how creative everyone was being while confined at home. That 90-second piece was very aspirational—spare, beautiful and uplifting. What it wasn't was messy. And as we've learned by now, WFH is very messy.

Today, Apple unveiled a counterpoint of sorts to that earlier "Creativity Goes On" spot—an amusing seven-minute short film, titled simply "The whole working-from-home thing," that brings back the lovable team of creative colleagues we first met in last year's three-minute film "The Underdogs."

Last time, they were working together to design a circular pizza box. Now, the job seems to have resurfaced as "Project Pandora's Box." And they've got another intense deadline, along with a budget that seems to be shrinking by the second. 

The whole working-from-home thing — Apple

The film packs almost every WFH cliché you can imagine into its seven minutes, but the quirky characters keep it fun and amusing. It also goes to great lengths to include all sorts of Apple hardware and software, but even this is palatable—the farcical nature of the work lets you get away with throwing the product in there more blatantly

There's even some software from other brands in here, like Adobe's InDesign. If they had fully made the leap and included Slack, it would even feel mostly believable, despite its obvious hyperboles.

Still, the piece—helmed by Smuggler director Mark Molloy—is entertaining and well worth the run time. Hopefully we'll get some BTS materials, as it would be interesting to see how cast and crew worked from home themselves to bring this WFH vision fully to life. Presumably that process was a comedy in its own right.

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Tim Nudd
Tim Nudd was editor in chief of the Clio Awards and editor of Muse by Clio from 2018 to 2023.

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