Everyone has a favorite pair of jeans. In fact, we are probably more closely connected to this one item of clothing than any other in our wardrobes, and that unique personal bond continues to be depicted in an ongoing campaign for Levi’s out of Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH), New York. The latest spot in the campaign, a :60 titled “Loyal” promoting the overall Levi’s brand as well as the 559 jean specifically, puts a new spin on the idea. “You can interpret that bond people have with their jeans in different ways,” explained BBH group creative director Thomas Hayo, “and this particular spot says, you might have a very strong bond with your jeans, but it goes both ways. Your jeans become so much a part of you that they are actually loyal to their specific owner.”
That concept is cleverly illustrated in “Loyal,” which opens with a guy swiping a pair of Levi’s he spots hanging over the edge of a hotel room veranda one evening. The thief puts them on and proceeds down the street but soon finds he isn’t in control of his own legs–the jeans that he just stole are mimicking the moves of their rightful owner, who is back in his hotel room with a woman. This makes for quite an awkward situation for the denim stealer as he jerks down the street.
Now as outlandish as this idea may sound, BBH wanted to make the spot as realistic as possible–and funny but not too funny. “It is a tricky balance to strike. You want it to be comedic. At the same time, you don’t want to fall into slapstick, which was a big danger with this spot,” Hayo said. “We didn’t want this to become like a Jim Carey piece where it goes over the top with facial expressions and body movements.”
BBH took a pass on directors who suggested executing the spot in such a wild and crazy fashion, and the job ultimately went to director Daniel Kleinman of Kleinman Productions, London, in part because he, too, thought the spot called for a realistic approach. Kleinman couldn’t be reached at press time, but Hayo said that the director was keen on casting a dancer as the thief–someone who could move his body in unusual ways, yet not deliver a slapstick performance. Casting a flexible dancer type would also allow for all of the action to be caught in camera, negating the need for special effects and contributing to the overall realness of the spot.
In addition to approving of his approach, BBH had also enjoyed a previous positive working experience with Kleinman, who had helmed a project last year for the agency promoting the safe driving of SUVs. “I personally like working with him because he does what’s right for the board. His style is always serving the concept,” Hayo said, noting, “He is actually one of the few people out there that are amazing all-around talents–he can do anything from comedy to stylish, cinematic stuff and very simple pieces to complicated CGI jobs.”
While BBH presented Kleinman with a tight script that had the structure of the spot spelled out, there was a lot of room for interpretation. “We encouraged Danny to come up with a lot of vignettes as well,” said Hayo, whose collaborators at BBH were executive creative director Kevin Roddy, art director/copywriters Paul Copeland and Tony Miller, art director John Hobbs and copywriter Peter Rosch. “And he [Kleinman] came up with a whole bunch of interesting scenarios.”
An example? “This is a really tiny thing that you might only get on repeat viewings, but it’s really a genius little touch,” Hayo shared. “When the thief first steals the Levi’s, there is a wide shot of him walking away from the building, and you see our main guy’s shadow in the window turning around, and as he turns around our thief does his first mimicking move. It’s a small detail, but it’s something that, without you noticing, really triggers what’s going to happen and what this is all about.”
With a cast made up of two actors from New York and a dancer plucked from Paris, Kleinman and a crew that included DP Ben Davis shot “Loyal” on location in Buenos Aires, Argentina, over the course of three evenings.
There was quite a bit of experimentation on the set, and Kleinman shot a lot of footage, according to Hayo, who reported that the shoot was productive and occurred without incident.
Then came the edit. A frequent collaborator of Kleinman’s, editor Steve Gandolfi of London’s Cut & Run cut the spot, which appears in cinemas and on television in a :60 version. (There are also :30 versions running on television.) “The big challenge in the edit was to communicate what was happening clearly in the first half of the spot,” Hayo said. “There is a lot of parallel action going on, and in the beginning of the spot you really had to establish that–do almost something like an a-b, a-b scenario where the guy in the hotel room does something, then the thief does something.”
Kleinman and Gandolfi did the initial cut of “Loyal” before the agency creatives joined the process. “We always try to give the director a first shot at the cut,” Hayo said. “I like working with a director very closely throughout the process. I’m not a big fan of taking the footage, then running with it.”
One thing that had to be decided before the final edit was what music track would accompany the spot. That was not an easy task, Hayo said. The agency went with Stevie Wonder’s classic “Superstition” after trying out “a million” tracks ranging from rock to R&B. “The key was to find something that had a nice rhythm and groove to it because the spot does become something of a dance,” Hayo remarked.
They certainly couldn’t have done better than Wonder’s “Superstition,” which is a perfect fit for this particular Levi’s spot. “The song adds another conceptual layer to it as well in terms of the lyrics and what they mean,” Hayo agreed. “It talks about superstition while this strange action is going on, so it’s an additional comment on what’s happening.”
