In a SHOOT “Top Spot of the Week” last month (4/16), the directing duo of Woods+Low–Chris Woods and Jeff Low–of OPC, Toronto, showed their comedic tongue-in-cheek sensibilities with a Subaru Outback commercial which at first appears to be an infomercial targeting the couch potato audience.
Now, the directors take a 180-degree turn to the serious but for the same agency, DDB Canada in Toronto, in a spot titled “Change” for Brita water filters.
We open on a tennis player who opens a closet from which fall hundreds of empty plastic water bottles. He pulls a tennis racket out of the closet and moves on.
In the next vignette, we see in the background a woman on a home exercise machine while the foreground consists of a floor littered with plastic water bottles.
Also surrounded by bottles in the following scene is a man seated in a chair, reading a newspaper.
Then from inside a house we view the silhouette of a postman as he drops some mail through the front-door slot. The mail falls upon a front hall filled with plastic bottles.
This gives way to a slice of life in which a guitarist strums a tune amidst a sea of discarded plastic bottles.
Similarly, next up is a dog gingerly trying to navigate his way across a room filled with plastic bottles.
Finally we see a woman looking at hundreds and hundreds of plastic bottles before her. The camera pulls back to reveal that she is in a bathing suit and preparing to dive into a swimming pool–except the pool has no water, only assorted bottles that once contained H2O.
On the upper corner of the screen, a super appears, which reads: “Ever thought about how many plastic water bottles Canadians bought last year?”
An end tag carries the message, “The Earth needs Brita.”
Titled “Change,” the spot serves as a sobering reminder about plastic pollution while positioning Brita as a much more responsible way to get, filter and drink water. Appropriately enough, “Change” debuted in Canada during Earth Week.
Personal consumption The creative brief for the spot had nothing to do with Earth Week. “The brief simply asked us to address the environmental aspect of the product,” recalled DDB art director Paul Riss. “The timing just happened to lead us to breaking it during Earth Week, which was a fortunate circumstance.”
DDB copywriter Matt Antonello said of the commercial’s creative genesis, “Paul and I just took the time to look at our personal consumption during the day and from there we projected that to the water bottle consumption of others, coming up with a total that was shocking. From there our goal was to ultimately make viewers feel the same shock.”
As for the choice of Woods+Low, Riss explained, “We worked with Chris [Woods] in the past and knew him initially as a prolific still photographer. We had liked what he and Jeff [Low] had done for the agency on Subaru. But all that wasn’t the deciding factor. The reason we went with them is that they brought an interesting perspective, their treatment was outstanding, reflecting painstaking detail and thoughtful additions to our idea.”
Antonello added, “We had a distinct vision in mind and it’s not often that we get a director who has the same exact take on an idea. Woods+Low did–the same tone, narrative, the final look of the film was exactly in line with what Paul and I had talked about previously. It was very clear that the directors would bring a lot to the table. As it turned out they took our idea and added some depth to it. None of what they added was superfluous.”
Fine touches
Antonello cited as an example of a fine added directorial touch being “the little expression on the woman’s face in the swimming pool scene. There was an emotion there that we hadn’t initially scripted.”
Antonello and Riss additionally credited editor Brian Wells of School Editorial for nailing the spot right from the start, culling through a large amount of footage.
The music was also key, noted Riss. “We did an exhaustive search, going through an endless number of songs to find the perfect one so that the spot wouldn’t hit you over the head but still be just right so as to create the proper impact. Vapor [Music Group] brought us that track, ‘A Fleeting Chance’ from a Canadian band from B.C., The British Columbians.”
