Hasta La Ideas

Neighbour‘s new campaign for music magazine NME‘s TV channel (shot by Jason Tozer) celebrates one of rock’n’roll’s great cliché’s: throwing a TV out of a window…

“Bands and trends come and go,” explains design agency Neighbour’s Dave Oscroft of their approach to the campaign, “so we decided to focus on the one consistent aspect of NME: rebellious rock & roll spirit. We wanted to communicate the purest metaphor of this and – after much thought – decided that throwing a TV out of a window says it best.

“We contacted Jason because we know he loves anything to do with smashing stuff and also with high speed experiments,” Oscroft continues. “We explained that our ideal shot would be to capture the set just as the screen smashes and the rest of it caves in and Jason recommended that we’d need to have about ten attempts at smashing the TV sets to safeguard a good shot. So, we acquired ten TV sets of varying shapes and sizes, sprayed most of them a suitably NME red and then set about finding a location.

“Initially we thought we could do it in a studio but it became clear quite soon that we would need an immense height to make the sets actually break, and more importantly, explode in the way we wanted them to.

“We ended up using Shoreditch fire station’s practice tower, which gave us plenty of height, a clear space to shoot, and health and safety experts on hand. They were super nice guys too, much thanks to them!

“The TV sets were dropped from around a 4th floor height into a roped off area, with the camera protected by a sheet of glass. We started off with cups and crockery to test the timing, then moved on to full-size, unpainted TVs, then finally our NME red painted ones. Amazingly, Jason managed to get the timing of the shots simply by eye – using a remote trigger cable to fire the camera .

“From smashing ten TVs, Jason managed to capture every single one at the point of impact – no mean feat considering he was triggering them by eye and reflex. Of the ten, we selected three that were amazing and with a crop and tiny bit of retouching.” Here are the ads:

The ads will appear in NME and various other titles, as well as online and as gig projection backgrounds.