With a series of nine black-and-white vignettes on www.10Cane.com, Mother, New York, takes 10 Cane Rum’s Internet audience back to the Caribbean of the 1960s. Creative director/director/DP Linus Karlsson shot the footage in Trinidad during a twelve-day still shoot where photographer Lars Topelmann took more than 5000 images for the campaign to launch this super-premium rum for Moët Hennessy, USA.
Since the distillery is located outside of Laventille, Trinidad, the trip to the Caribbean was primarily intended to capture still images of the origin of the product. This library of photographs included shots of the distillery, bottling plant, cane fields, and the people involved in the process. The photos are highly stylized, often featuring men dressed in fine suits. But the overriding idea was to give the brand a sense of history, and establish an iconic, simple and exclusive feel.
Karlsson explained that he took a camera with him and had loose thoughts about the kind of footage he might shoot and the expectation of doing some informal casting. He had concepts for the shorts like following a master bartender, but others, like the man who performs in “Daryl Dancing,” came about on the fly. That vignette was filmed the last night of shooting at a party the crew held on top of its hotel. Daryl worked at the distillery and happened to love dancing. As he showed off his moves, Karlsson kept shooting and a short was born. Another featured talent was Sir Royalty, who was actually the team’s driver. “We let these characters come to life and let them tell a story to us and [we] documented it,” Karlsson related.
MIXED MESSAGES
Because it “just seemed right” the shorts feature French narration and open with the French national anthem. The client is part French, and the French introduced sugarcane to Trinidad, Karlsson related, but he added that those facts didn’t really factor into the decision. To add even more playfulness to the work, the words of the French-speaking narrator are completely unrelated to the English subtitles. So anyone who speaks French will get a laugh out of the disparity.
Seemingly serious, but actually quite the opposite, “Growing Cane” is set in a sugarcane field and the subtitles explain that they use a two-part fertilization process. One part is accordion solos–we see a man dressed in a suit playing an accordion amid the cane. The second part is telling knock-knock jokes as another well-dressed man is shown enjoying a cocktail in the field.
Some of the shorts show elegant men and women in festive situations enjoying cocktails, while others feature elements of the rum-manufacturing process, like “Quality Control,” where a man inspects the product while on the beach and in the surf–of course, with a humorous spin.
“Meeting these characters [in Trinidad] was actually really interesting because we spent twelve days with these guys and they were telling us stories; [it’s] almost like the script wrote itself and our role really became more about documenting this and getting the feel of it,” Karlsson related.
The other films are: “A Situation,” “World Record,” “Leaving Home,” “One Word Joke,” “Planting the Flag” and “Power Lines.” A second set of films is set for release around the holidays.
These shorts are buried in the site, which one navigates by entering a word into the search box. It’s a bit of free association. “If you enter from the billboard in Los Angeles, there is nothing that says there is a movie online. However, it may be a very pleasant surprise to you that you discover [it] and I think that sense of discovery is very important,” Karlsson said.
This is the first project out of Mother Films, New York, which was simply established for this specific project, but Karlsson said more fare could come out of it.
Additional credit at the agency goes to: Paul Malmstrom, creative director; Todd Lamb, copywriter; Sean Carmody, art director; and Margaux Ravis, producer.
Editor Luis Moreno of Jump, New York, cut the films. David Bryen and William Zitzer were assistant editors. Dee Tagert was executive post producer.
Jon Rekdal III composed the music out of Rough n’ Ready, New York.