The invite system may be gone for the OnePlus 3, but that’s not stopping the Chinese company from trying to build up hype for its upcoming smartphone launch. OnePlus has released a feel-good documentary with plenty of inspirational post-rock music, and a lot of swearing.
The Second Album tells the “untold story behind the OnePlus 2 launch,” which sounds grandiose for a product launch, and on the surface doesn’t seem like a story worth telling. But it features footage inside OnePlus’ offices in the weeks leading up to the company’s second smartphone launch, and the world’s first VR product launch.
OnePlus provided its supporters with Google Cardboards for free ahead of the OnePlus 2 launch, enabling them both to watch co-founder Carl Pei showing off the device, and to follow him around the firm’s offices. For the OnePlus 3, OnePlus is going even bigger by offering Loop VR, a quality headset, to its supporters, to enable them to watch the unveiling of the OnePlus 3 — and they will even be able to purchase the device via a VR store.
The Second Album depicts how intense work can be for a burgeoning company that only celebrated its second anniversary in December 2015. It also shows how busy things can get in the days leading up to a product launch, and how much work is done in those last few days.
The 17-minute documentary also goes into Pei filming the VR video for the OnePlus 2, and includes funny tidbits such as miscues and out-takes. Pei and his team themselves had trouble accessing their own 360 video launch, thanks to their poor hotel Wi-Fi — that, along with anxiety for the launch led to him hilariously releasing a slew of curse words. It’s rare to see this side of a smartphone manufacturer’s co-founder.
The company has a cult following, and this behind-the-scenes video is undeniably for the fans. As Pei says in the video, there are people with 50,000 posts in the OnePlus forums.
“This means they post 200 posts a day,” Pei said. “For us, our users are just as important as the media.”
You’ll catch a handful of fans in the video — fans who waited in line to get their hands on the OnePlus 2 when it launched — and this clearly demonstrates just how popular OnePlus launches are around the world.
There’s 11 days to go until the OnePlus 3 launches in virtual reality, and you can check out all the information we have on it here.
