Motorola is promoting its latest video phone with a TV ad charting the evolution of film with homages to classic genres including the National Velvet-style love story and Die Hard-style action movie.
The story features a hero being chased through a string of classic film genres including a cowboys and Indians scene and a medieval joust, culminating in an Eastern-influenced ninja finale.
Motorola's 60-second ad consists of 10 scenes starting with the use of a zoetrope - a 19th-century precursor to film - through black-and-white Buster Keaton-style footage, all the way to modern film quality with the video feature on Motorola's Motorizr Z8.
The ad was shot in Spain using locations such as the castle featured in the 1961 Charlton Heston film El Cid and the site that doubled as an American frontier town in Clint Eastwood's A Fistfull of Dollars and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
It is the first TV campaign to be developed for the company by Simon Thompson, the marketer behind iconic Honda ads such as "Cog" and "Choir".
Mr Thompson left Motorola to become European marketing director at Lastminute.com after the new Motorizr Z8 was completed.
The ad campaign has been developed by Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO, the agency behind work such as Guinness's "Surfer", and the director behind Sony's "Balls".
"In and amongst a lot of commentary about innovation in the mobile category I think this product really does have a story worth telling," said the AMV BBDO chief executive, Farah Ramzan Golant.
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