BBDO New York’s latest Mountain Dew spot, "Duo," continues to maintain the image of the soft drink as being up-to-the-minute and on the cutting edge of pop culture. Ironically, the ad does so by drawing inspiration from a film genre that’s been around since the 1960s, but was only introduced to the Western world last year.
Director Ang Lee’s film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon seems the obvious inspiration for the :60 "Duo," directed by Tarsem of bicoastal/international @radical.media. However, Tiger is but one of a number of Chinese films in the tradition of wu xia, an action-fantasy genre featuring heroic and magical characters, beautiful surroundings and larger-than-life martial arts sequences. One convention of wu xia is that certain martial arts masters, owing to tremendous strength and training, are able to leap higher and farther than the rest of us—seeming to defy gravity and the laws of physics.
BBDO executive creative director Bill Bruce, who also served as copywriter, noted that a few years ago the agency had created a well-received martial arts-oriented Mountain Dew commercial (SHOOT Top Spot, 1/17/97, p. 13). Featuring Jackie Chan, it was directed by Kinka Usher of Venice, Calif.-based House of Usher Films. Bruce said that BBDO wanted to revisit martial arts for this project.
"We became familiar with this wu xia genre, which has been around Beijing for forty years; it’s like our Westerns," noted Bruce, relating that the creatives watched twenty-five wu xia films as reference. "Some amazing work has been done [in this genre]. It just seemed like a good place to go with the campaign." In addition to Bruce, the BBDO creative team consisted of chief creative officer Ted Sann, art director Doris Cassar, producers Hyatt Choate and Amy Schachner, and music producer Loren Parkins.
The spot is set in Beijing during the Ming Dynasty. An Asian-inspired score by composer Stewart Copeland via Groove Addicts, Los Angeles—with traditional flute and drum-heavy Chinese instrumentation—not only helps drive the pacing of the spot, but contributes significantly to the sense of authenticity. This is also achieved through the ad’s richly detailed production design, lighting, period costuming and makeup.
"Duo" opens on a moonlit open courtyard, where a can of Dew whizzes through the night air, prompting the whinnying of horses. Supered text relates, "It is a quest for Dew." Alerted to some sort of disturbance, two female protagonists leave their houses to investigate; each goes outside as the can flies past.
The race is on to capture the Dew. One woman—garbed in white, in the traditional long tunic of the period—ascends, bounding over rooftops in pursuit of the soft drink. The other—similarly garbed, in a darker outfit—races on foot below. Ultimately the women come to an abrupt halt when each manages to grab the can with one hand.
In this standoff, they unsheathe swords from scabbards strapped behind their backs and begin battling. The combatants spar expertly with the long, heavy weapons, while each maintains her one-handed grip on the Dew. One sword is sent flying; it wedges itself into a brick wall.
A series of high kicking maneuvers sends the white-clad woman hurtling backwards, where she lands on a house roof and is stunned to realize that she’s holding the Dew. At this her opponent launches into a helicopter spin, landing on the roof, where the two women engage in hand-to-hand combat. Holding each other by the arms, they somersault sideways off the roof, to land gracefully on the ground.
The spot then reveals four Mandarin "Dew dudes" who have been observing the battle from a rooftop perch. "You have come far in the ways of the Dew," says one to the women. "Yet you miss the point," observes another. A third then shoots a feathered dart in the air; it creates two holes as it pierces the Dew can that the women are holding above their heads. From the holes spout two arched streams of the beverage, which flow perfectly into the women’s open mouths.
The lesson is iterated by one of the Mandarin dudes and shown in supered text: "It is better to have half a Dew than no Dew at all."
Bruce explained, "We wanted to set up the spot to show the women doing a discipline that’s internal and cerebral: [At the beginning], one is feeding her birds; the other is doing some calligraphy. It’s as if they’re in training. But as the can of Mountain Dew comes flying in, it’s as if they resort to their external arts. Once they catch the can, they begin to fight over it. We didn’t want one to win and the other to lose, so we thought that their sharing the can had a certain wisdom to it."
The commercial was shot in April over six nights in Beijing. "We chose the Ming Dynasty time frame," said Bruce, "and wanted to be accurate and true to everything—location, wardrobe, dialect and so on. We thought about building sets, but it just wasn’t feasible."
In addition to Tarsem, Bruce credits production designer Ged Clarke, who scoured Beijing shops for authentic props. During the initial scout in Beijing, Tarsem found the location, which was actually a backlot movie set that has hosted the filming of soap operas and period features.
Tarsem proved the ideal fit for the job. "We wanted the spot to be very epic in nature," Bruce commented, "and Tarsem is such a great filmmaker. Once we spoke to him and he was very much into the project, he was the only guy we seriously considered. The idea seemed perfectly suited to his talent."
The BBDO team and Tarsem went to Beijing to meet with Hong Kong-based action director/fightmaster/choreographer Ridley Tsui, and supplied him with the specs for the project. Tsui also recommended the talent: trained martial artists and dancers Na Chian and Li Feng Mai, who appear in the spot along with male stunt doubles.
"Because of safety issues," said Bruce, "we deferred to whom Tsui thought would be best for the roles." Tsui, who choreographed the spot on site, spent nearly six weeks training the performers in the moves. One challenge was the fact that the women were to hold on to the can for the majority of the sword fight—a situation Tsui hadn’t worked with before. "We wondered, ‘Can we pull this off?’ " recalled Bruce. "But after we started working on it, we saw that this could be something special and different for that genre."
The flying sequences were achieved in-camera with the use of 60-foot wire-rigged cranes, which were later removed in a three-week-long post process at Santa Monica-based visual effects house Method. According to Method visual effects producer Sue Troyan, the team at Method became involved in the job at the storyboard stage. Both she and Method visual effects set supervisor Alex Frisch were on set in Beijing.
"We’ve worked on a number of Mountain Dew spots—’Cheetah,’ ‘Mock Opera’ and a few other spots we’d done for the agency last year," reported Troyan, "so we have a good working relationship with Bill Bruce. We were finishing up the Mountain Dew spot ‘Ram’ when Bill brought this to us."
In addition to rig and crane removal, Method also worked on the bluescreened opening shots of the can flying by, and on the scene in which the can flies into the women’s hands. "We had a Mountain Dew can on a blue stick that the AD shoved into their hands. We had to remove the stick. This was hard because we had to rebuild everything underneath, which was their arms and the sleeves on their costumes."
The dart-piercing-the-can scene required a good amount of Inferno work by the Method team, led by visual effects supervisor/lead artist Cedric Nicolas. Explained Troyan, "The women are holding an actual can, and we took the dart, filmed it over blackscreen, gave it movement, moved it through the can, created the holes—and even shot some liquid spritz over black, which we added to the plate."
The hero drinking shot is also a complete comp, although the production team attempted to shoot it practically with the use of a rig incorporating a huge straw. That approach was scrapped when the liquid traveled too rapidly for the women to drink it. "We shot the women in the drinking position and then did a separate pass of the liquid coming out of the can," Troyan continued. "Eventually we ended up taking the practical liquid and [manipulated it digitally], adding an almost painterly [effect] to get the flow right.
"It was a fun spot to work on," concluded Troyan, "because it was very artistic, in terms of some of the visual effects that were subtle—things that most people would think were practical [elements]."
