Le trio de réalisateurs Paul Hardcastle, Tom Lindsay et Dominic Leung (Trim) nous propose cette superbe vidéo pour Schwartz. Mettant en avant les différents mélanges et assaisonnements proposées par la marque, cette création pensée avec l’agence Grey offre des explosions de couleurs en slow-motion.
L’agence NZ Transport nous rappelle que tout le monde peut faire des erreurs au volant, et qu’il est essentiel d’anticiper celles des autres. Appelé Mistakes, cette vidéo où un père de famille, brûle un stop, grillant la priorité à une voiture roulant trop vite imagine un dialogue imaginaire entre les deux.
Pour la seconde année consécutive, le projet TEN initié par Fotolia, a permis à tous les passionnés d’art numériques d’accéder chaque mois au fichier source d’un des plus grands artistes du secteur et propose pour clôturer cette saison un concours pour défier ces artistes, avec à la clé une campagne de promotion internationale. Retour sur les créations et thèmes de cette saison ci-dessous.
12 – décembre / Création Hors-série (hors-concours « TEN by Fotolia ») #2 – Dune et Sosoa
11 – novembre / Game on ! – Peter Jaworowski
10 – octobre / Love at first sight – Alberto Seveso
9 – septembre / Mixed messages – Sergio Del Puerto
8 – août / Création Hors-série (hors-concours « TEN by Fotolia ») #1 – Lydia Baillergeau
7 – juillet / Unknown destination – Alexey Samsonov
6 – juin / Through time – Alexander Otto
5 – mai / Animal Instinct – Mike Harrison
4 – avril / You can’t stop the music! – Marumiyan
3 – mars / Pump up the color – Adhemas Batista
2 – février / Myth in motion – Soongyu Gwon
1 – janvier / Engineering Dreams – Gustavo Brigante
// En savoir plus : concours pour défier ces artistes du 10 janvier au 10 février 2014
Herb and spice brand Schwartz has released a striking new ad to promote its Flavour Shots products. The ad sees several tons of black peppercorns, cardamon, turmeric, paprika, cumin seeds, ginger, chili and coriander explode in time to a piece of music composed by MJ Cole…
The spot is by Grey London and directed by Chris Cairns. The effects in the ad were all shot for real, with Cairns working with pyrotechnic designers Machine Shop to create the installation, which was built at Pinewood Studios in the UK.
While explosive blasts of colour in an advert will inevitably always bring to mind the Sony Paint spot, the inspiration for the Schwartz ad came from a more complex source, as Grey creative director Andy Lockley explains. “Our creative challenge was to dramatise flavour,” he says, “a sense that is invisible and silent. I read an article a while ago about a neurological condition called Gustatory Synesthesia, where the brain converts words and sounds into tastes, a fusing of two senses. I always thought that it would be a fascinating premise to bring to life filmically somehow.”
“This is a visualisation of the intense sensory stimulation you get from herbs and spices,” agrees Chris Cairns. “We wanted to make the invisible, visible. While the finished piece appears effortlessly in sync, triggering 140 separate explosions to within a millisecond was incredibly complex. It took a lot of testing, trial and error.”
Photographs from the shoot
The spot is highly unusual for this sector, which often falls back on traditional family scenes in ads, or relies on celebrity endorsement. Lockley admits the client took a little persuasion to come on board with the idea. “Our client acknowledged that many ads in their sector tend to take place in or around a kitchen, often with mum preparing the meal and families enjoying the end product,” he says. “They were keen to do something disruptive but it was still quite a challenge for them to leave behind what was a tried and trusted formula. Several rounds of research convinced them that our proposal would work against their criteria.”
The team approached MJ Cole to compose the music that the explosions of herbs and spices would be choreographed to. While known mostly as a house and garage producer, Cole was classically trained at the Royal College of Music, and the piece he contributed is a delicate piano arrangement.
“We then took the digital ‘midi’ from the music which gave the pyrotechnic designers the precise timings for the explosions, and each note and chord was then translated into an eruption,” says Lockley. “Different herbs and spices were assigned to different notes based on their different characteristics and colours, while the size and volume of each eruption was also painstakingly adjusted to reflect the sound that it represented…. Essentially, we created a ‘3D soundscape’ with herbs and spices.”
The ad had to be shot in one take. “It was a fairly high-pressure shoot because we only got one go at getting it right – once the explosions happened the set was destroyed, so there was no room for technical error,” says Lockley. “Fortunately, a period of testing before the actual day meant that we had calculated the amounts of explosives required to achieve the desired effect from each herb and spice.
“Different inertias and weights had to be carefully considered and the explosive charges adjusted accordingly. It was a bit like tuning a giant piano. But as with any shoot, there is always room for technical failure. In real time, everything was over in the blink of an eye and it was only when we watched it back at 1,000 frames per second could we be sure everything was in sync. Thankfully, it went precisely as choreographed!”
The making-of film below gives more info on how it was all done:
Credits:
Agency: Grey London
CCO: Nils Leonard
Creative director: Andy Lockley
Creatives: Pauline Ashford, Mike Kennedy
Director: Chris Cairns
Production company: Partizan
Music: MJ Cole/Soho Sound
Post: MPC
L’agence DDB a imaginé pour Hasbro cette série de visuels très réussie pour le jeu de société Trivial Pursuit. Reprenant des images mondialement connus, et s’amusant à les remplacer par des camemberts, éléments essentiels du jeu. Une idée ingénieuse à découvrir en images dans la suite de l’article.
Alors que nous vous parlions des carnets Moleskine Simpsons à l’occasion des 25 ans de la série, voici que Lego dévoile ce set spécialement pensé pour illustrer la maison de la famille américaine la plus connue. Des créations sympathiques permettant de jouer avec les personnages sortis de l’imagination de Matt Groening.
Afin de faire la promotion de la chaîne de steakhouse russe Double Grill&Bar, l’agence RA Voskhod a eu l’ingénieuse idée de proposer un affichage 4×3 montre un steak géant, qui durant la nuit a été recouverte de huit sangles qui ont brulé l’affiche, donnant une impression de marques de cuisson pour la viande.
It’s January, so it’s time to think about detoxing and joining a gym. What a drag. To help you along, Karmarama has created this new spot for Virgin Active, which ignores all the usual gym bunny clichés and instead features a man riding a motorbike furiously across an African desert in his pants…
The footage of the motorcyclist is intercut at various intervals with short blasts of found film showing various kinds of activity – some are sports-based, but others show scenes from nature, including flowers bursting into bloom. It’s all quite unusual for a gym, but that’s exactly the point, says ECD Sam Walker, who also directed the spot.
“The brief from Virgin Active was to make people reappraise VA and elevate them above the usual gym and health club brands,” he says. “We were trying to actually make them stand for something, a more active but also a more positive way of approaching life. We were creating a feeling, an attitude to life, rather than just a health club … it’s relentlessly positive but not in a cheesy way. We wanted people to look at it and see a guy who is living life how he wants, without fear or restraint. It’s about being active in every way, not just about exercise. We were lucky that the client backed us and wanted to do something brave and different for the category.”
The ad was shot in Calvinia, about eight hours drive from Cape Town (photographs from the shoot shown above and below). Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was a slightly hair-raising experience. “We had very little time or money which is always difficult but sometimes it makes you more resourceful and single-minded,” says Walker. “We were struggling to land our hero cast but when we landed in South Africa there happened to be the biggest biker rally of the year on at the same time. So we went straight from the airport down to the bike festival and started street casting. The guy we chose in the end was just a guy running a T-shirt company. He had a really cinematic face and a confident, self assured aura. We just asked him, ‘how would you feel about riding a bike at high speed through the desert in your pants?’. ‘I’d love to,’ he said and with that we knew we had our man.
“In fact we cast a stunt double as well because I couldn’t be sure how good at riding bikes he was,” Walker continues. “In the end it’s the actor in all but one of the shots which is pretty incredible. It was actually a surprisingly dangerous shoot with lots of room for things to go wrong. If he had come off through hitting a rock or a bump he, and then me, would have been in serious trouble because we were a hell of a long way from the nearest hospital. If he had come off at the speed he was travelling at, wearing pretty much nothing, it wouldn’t have been good.
“Ironically the closest we came to disaster is when the stunt man was doing one of his shots. He hit a big bump going at top speed and there was clear daylight between his feet and the seat of the bike, with the back wheel almost over the front wheel. Only his hands were still attached and it was a miracle he landed without coming off. He’d been a stuntman for 28 years and he said it was the closest he’d come to properly wiping out.”
Credits:
Agency: Karmarama
ECDs: Sam Walker, Joe de Souza
Director: Sam Walker
Production company: Kream
Southwold design agency Spring has launched a new website and campaign for Visit Suffolk offering tourists an interactive guide to the county
The new Visit Suffolk site uses a responsive theme and flat, bold graphics. An image-led homepage displays local weather forecasts, event listings and articles and can be filtered according to visitors’ interests. It also hosts live stream of social media posts that use the hashtag #ifoundsuffolk.
The best feature is an interactive map providing a look at the region’s highlights by area: it uses clear and colourful icons and is easy to navigate, allowing visitors to filter landmarks and attractions by category and create and save local itineraries. A ‘take me somewhere lovely button’ provides randomly generated suggestions for those looking for some inspiration.
The redesign forms part of a communications strategy to promote travel in the region – an accompanying campaign site and Facebook app offer direct access to the Google Maps feature, which includes added illustrations of deer, trees, boats and sea creatures around the Suffolk area – and Spring will also be releasing weekly themed content on the Visit Suffolk site and Facebook page (this week’s theme is wool towns).
Spring has been designing the project since September and will be working on the campaign throughout the year, says co-founder Erika Clegg.
“Our creative vision was to allow site visitors a real experience of discovery on a website and app that would allow them to wander, explore and uncover unexpected treasures. It was also important that the site projected a sense of being a consumer brand experience, rather than a standard tourism board offering,” she adds.
As the project is in its early stages, some areas of the map are sparsely populated and a paid-for listings package means there is a risk that larger businesses will be given more exposure than smaller, independent venues – local brewery Adnams, for example, features heavily. But both the new campaign and site offer an engaging alternative to traditional tourism sites, and seamlessly integrate editorial content with live updates, local events and social conversations, allowing viewers a look at what people are saying about the region as well as what there is to see and do.
The Mayor of London has launched a campaign to promote the city’s menswear industry showcasing iconic fashion looks invented in Britain.
Brogues, tartan and the three piece suit feature in Tube posters advertising London as ‘the home of menswear’. The campaign was launched to coincide with London Collections’ men’s fashion week and aims to highlight the industry’s contribution to the UK economy while helping promote independent labels based in the city, says creative director Tom Lancaster.
Images were shot in and around Smithfield Market and at Beppe’s café in East London by street photographer Jonathan Daniel Pryce. “Our brief was to find a way to communicate the cultural ambition of being ‘the home of menswear’ with making a creative industry story about menswear attractive to real Londoners,” explains Lancaster.
“To do that, we put clothes in everyday settings – on the street, in a café – to make them accessible rather than nice. The overall tone was London shown in a real light, with models that look like real Londoners, but with a premium finish to show clothes in their best light,” he adds.
The campaign builds on a heritage map Lancaster worked on with the British Fashion Council, GQ and the Museum of London in 2013 which identifies ten famous styles invented in Britain and made famous by London designers or public figures: Vivienne Westwood adapted tartan and tweed for the catwalk, the three piece suit was introduced by Charles II in 1666 and brogues, which can be traced back to Scotland and Ireland, were made famous by the Duke of Windsor, who wore them on golf trips.
“With the new campaign, we wanted to tell that story to Londoners in a way that would showcase London’s menswear brands to a broader male shopping audience – not people with a specific interest in the industry already – and give exposure to small and medium businesses that aren’t generally running out of home campaigns on their own. [We also wanted to] stake a claim to being the menswear capital of the world… and show how the creative industries are helping the economy and creating jobs in town,” adds Lancaster.
Posters are supported by a social media competition inviting Londoners to share their postcode’s fashion highlights using the hashtag #londonmenswear, and winners will receive items featured in the campaign.
Credits
Creative direction: Tom Lancaster
Design: Vivienne Lang, Glen Birchall, Sergio Fernandez
Photography: Jonathan Daniel Pryce
Copy: Helen Booth
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