Now this is a viral ad campaign done well. To promote its N-Gage gaming handset, Nokia staged a human version of its popular Snake mobile-phone game in Lisbon and shot a stop-motion film of it. While they do cheat a bit (the section where they jump over a pool was done with a board, as you can see in the behind-the-scenes video), the video is mostly true to stop-motion form — an impressive spectacle that clearly took a ton of work. It’s not quite as stunning as the Sony Bravia bouncy-balls commercial, but it’s not boring.

The video is available on YouTube or in high-quality and downloadable form on a separate web site (which is also where I saw the behind-the-scenes clip). Since it was posted 10 days ago, it landed on the YouTube home page (and not in a paid slot) and has collected about 460,000 views.