Client: Cellebrite – Genre: Customer Story
Operation Raccoon
A brand documentary, shot in Iceland about the Iceland District Prosecutor’s Office Using AI Tools to Investigate Financial Crime
Cellebrite makes the software that helps investigators turn seized devices into evidence. We went to Reykjavík to tell the story of one case , and the prosecutors who solved it.
01. The brief
What we were asked to do
Cellebrite wanted a film for their C2C UK event. The subject was a real investigation run by Iceland’s District Prosecutor’s Office (Héraðssaksóknari), and the technology that helped crack it.
The catch: almost none of it could be filmed. The receipts, the phone data, the photographs, the evidence that actually moved the case, was sensitive, sealed, or both. We had a story about looking closely at things, and almost nothing we were allowed to look at.
The evidence that cracked it: Evidence Redacted. Evidence Redacted.
So the brief became a problem of translation. How do you show an investigation you’re not allowed to show, and still make it feel like one?
02 — What we did
One shoot day.
Then a build.
We sent a director and a two-camera Sony package to Reykjavík for a single shoot day. Meg Amos directed, sitting down with the District Prosecutor and the investigators who ran the case. Everything else, we built in the edit..
A
Interviews as the spine
The people who worked the case carry it. No narrator, no script read to camera, just the prosecutor and his investigators explaining, plainly, what they were up against and how they got through it.
B
We built the evidence we couldn’t film
Custom motion design stands in for the material the camera never saw: a 2008 news-headline montage to set the scene, a sequence of period computers for the “primitive tools” the office started with, an animated receipt-matching sequence for the AI-assisted work, and a hierarchy graphic that climbs a criminal network from the money mules to the figure at the top.
C
Sound doing the heavy lifting
Atmospheric, restrained, deliberately closer to a forensic documentary than a corporate testimonial. The film should make you lean in.
D
Two masters, one of them subtitled
A clean cut and a subtitled cut, so the film travels, built for an English-speaking international audience watching contributors speak in their own context.
03 — The story
Operation Raccoon, in four movements
The film moves through four beats, the country, the office and why it exists, the case itself, and what it was all for. The case is Operation Raccoon: a financial-crime investigation that began with money mules and a paper trail, and ended with Cellebrite’s Pathfinder and Inseyets software connecting dots that people, on their own, couldn’t.
2008
A small, advanced country
Iceland, around 380,000 people, and a financial crash that changed how the state pursues economic crime.
THE OFFICE
Investigation and prosecution
The District Prosecutor’s Office, built to take on embezzlement, tax evasion and organised economic crime, under one roof.
2018
The case
Operation Raccoon. From the money mules at the bottom, the trail is followed up the hierarchy toward the people running it.
TODAY
The result
Seventeen arrests, a suspected kingpin identified, and a case now with the prosecutor, the office’s own measure of the work.
04 — The result
What we delivered
We delivered the finished film, clean and subtitled masters, to a tight deadline, in time to premiere at Cellebrite’s C2C UK event. It’s now live on Cellebrite’s own channel.
What we’re proud of isn’t the kit list. It’s that a story which couldn’t be filmed still plays like one.
Shoot
One day in Reykjavík
Build
Interviews + custom motion design
Premiere
Cellebrite’s C2C UK event
Commissioned by
Cellebrite
Premiered
Cellebrite’s C2C UK event
Producer
Meg Amos
Production
Here Now Films – In-house
In partnership with
Iceland District Prosecutor’s Office
Edit & Colour
Alexander Webb
Subject
Iceland District Prosecutor’s Office