Breeze" is an inventive new ad from Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH), London, featuring combined elements of live action, still photo-graphy and computer generated 3-D and 2-D imagery. Directed by John Robertson via Passion Pictures, London, the commercial opens on a blue and white graphic image of a bowl of fruit, something that may be found in a typical paint-by-numbers book.
As the camera pulls out and the street outside is revealed through the window, we see that the scene is also a paint-by-numbers picture. Some of the numbers on a mailbox detach and float away with a breeze, and then other numbers join them until they form a huge swarm, spiraling through London. Finally, the numbers fly into a bar and plunge into a glass of Gordon’s Gin and tonic. As they do this, the glass and Gordon’s gin bottle are transformed into color. The voiceover reads: "It’s what goes into Gordon’s that gives it its colorful flavor." Television and cinema commercials of the ad were created for the U.K. The television ads are already on air, and the cinema version is scheduled to debut in January.
"The idea was that Gordon’s is visually clear, but it has a lot in it—botanicals and a colorful flavor," explained BBH’s Dave Monk, who served as co-art director/co-copywriter with Matt Waller. "We wanted to communicate that idea with a paint-by-number … [which] would stand out."
On the selection of helmer Robertson, Monk said, "His treatment was really good. … He seemed to get the idea, and he brought his own ideas to the table, which was really encouraging."
Robertson—who is also a designer—explained that he started by examining paint-by-numbers books. "They are immensely complicated," the director said. "There is so much line work and numbers. The first task was to strip out extraneous information so you could have a moving frame on TV and still read it clearly. The ad was the process of reduction … paint-by-number, but clear and easy to read.
"Our first job was to plan and time all the shots," Robertson continued. "The storyboard was a crucial part of this process and after boarding lots of ideas, we probably used only half of them. One of the reasons for this was that the actions become more difficult to read once the live action has been treated to look like a painting-by-numbers book, so we had to slow down the shots so that they could be read properly. When the board was approved by the agency and client, we either shot each scene in live action or built it in CG. For example, the people and street scenes are live action, and the fly over the Thames is CG. The backgrounds were a mixture of photographic stills, photomontage or drawn."
The live-action plates were lensed on location on the streets of London, and green screen work was completed at Westway Studio, also in London. Charlie Ponniah and Olivier Cariou served as directors of photography. The elements were composited together.
"The painting-by-numbers look was achieved by using a plug in for Tinderbox called Contour, which put a contour line around posterized tones on each composited image," Robertson reported. "These contour lines were then used as a guide for the rotoscoped drawings, which were like a skin placed on top of the composited live action and CG [to give the image a graphic treatment]. A team of fourteen animators took five weeks to produce the rotoscoped drawings."
The team used a collection of software tools, including NewTek’s LightWave 3D, Softimage’s XSI and Toonz, Discreet’s Combustion, Adobe’s After Effects and Illustrator, and Tinderbox.
"One of the CG challenges was to create the spiraling swarm of numbers," recalled Robertson. "To achieve this, technical director Mark Wilson wrote script to make a numbers tumbling tool, which attached numbers to deformed vertex clouds. This tool allowed animators to benefit from the numbers animating automatically, but still gave them absolute control over the way the cloud of numbers moved through the scene."
The music for the commercial is "Pictures of Matchstick Men" by Status Quo, and British actor Terence Stamp provided the voiceover.
