Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. Thomas Edison came up with the light bulb. The Wright Brothers pioneered the first flight. And the Guinness Brewery was the first to put beer in a bottle. Or so claims a recent campaign from BBDO New York. Gerry Graf, formerly vice chairman/executive creative director at BBDO, served as copywriter on the campaign, with Joel Rodriguez handling art directing chores. (Graf is now executive creative director at the New York office of TBWA/ Chiat/Day.)
Guinness won’t get a Nobel Prize for the beer-in-a-bottle discovery, but the animation style that Burbank, Calif.-based MooSpots director/co-founder Shaun Sewter created for the campaign, which introduces the Guinness six-pack, is proving to be its own brilliant invention.
The package features two old-world Guinness brew masters rendered in a collage/cut-out style with heads that come from old 1860s photographs. An extensive search through stock photography was conducted to find the right faces, complete with bushy handlebar moustaches.
Meanwhile, the backgrounds that the animated characters are placed in range from a house party in full swing to a quiet Irish countryside. The deliberately crude stop-motion brew masters move like two-dimensional Popsicle-stick puppets across each background. Their arm movements are staccato, and when they "walk," they sort of slide across the floor.
Clearly, bottling beer in this day and age is nothing new, but it’s new to these old-school brewers, and the revelation is utterly mind blowing. In "Bread," one brewer introduces the idea to a second brewer, who finds the idea amazing and asks what else his inventive friend has been up to. Turns out he’s also fashioned a machine that slices bread. Each new idea is punctuated by both men with a hearty, "Brilliant!"
"Party" takes the brew masters out of the Guinness headquarters and drops them in the middle of a house party, where the guests dancing in the living room appear to have been plucked from the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album. "Call" places the two science-savvy brew masters in the Irish countryside for an afternoon picnic.
Both locations demonstrate how easy it is to carry around Guinness draft when it comes in a bottle. And finally, "Six Pack" brings us back to the brewery, where the pair discovers how to carry six beers at once. Each spot concludes with the voiceover, "Guinness draft, straight from the bottle. Enjoy it everywhere," followed by the brew masters’ often-heard self-congratulatory exclamation, "Brilliant!"
Photo finish
According to BBDO senior producer Winslow Dennis, the idea to animate the ads was born out of an animatic the agency had originally created for testing in focus groups. "Initially, this was intended to be a live-action [campaign], but the animatics were so clever that we thought nothing could be funnier than this," relates Dennis, who notes that in addition to the four spots airing, there is talk of creating one or two more for the U.S. Two of the commercials, "Bread" and "Party," have been sold to the Australian market, where they will be aired as a test.
Dennis called in Sewter, who is known for his stop-motion work and has done several Chex Mix commercials, including "Early People" and "Honey Bear" via Campbell Mithun, Minneapolis.
"When I talked to Shaun Sewter, he was so enthusiastic," recalls Dennis. "He did tests for us that just hit the nail on the head." But what ultimately sold BBDO on MooSpots was the company’s idea for shooting the background plates of the Guinness Brewery.
"[Guinness] didn’t exactly want it to be a period piece, but they did want it to have a sense of nostalgia infused with a bit of modernity," Sewter notes. So he enlisted the help of his friend and colleague Stephen Berkman, who is a film professor at the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, Calif. Berkman shoots with a wet plate camera, one of the first photographic imaging mediums, and recently shot stills for the film Cold Mountain.
"With this technique, you take a photograph and it immediately looks one hundred years old," explains Sewter, who met Berkman at now defunct The End, when Sewter was a director there from 1996 to ’00; Berkman once directed through the company, and is a long-time friend of Luke Thornton, a founder of The End, who now maintains bicoastal/international Believe Media.
Berkman shot all the exterior and interior plates of the Guinness Brewery with his wet plate camera and Sewter followed with a Nikon D-1X digital camera to take all the same background shots. The idea was to fuse the two plates together in Photoshop to create an interesting hybrid effect.
"Shooting this way felt like dueling technologies," shares Sewter. "The old camera required no lighting, while the Nikon is pretty contrast-y and I’m always having to adjust it. So in one hundred and fifty years of technology, we got our shots at exactly the same time. There’s advancement for you!"
The remaining shots of the party scene, the countryside and the body parts and heads of the brew masters were all handled digitally. In some cases, Berkman’s film was used to add texture to a particular person or background.
After shooting all the original elements and silhouetting them in Photoshop, Sewter and a team of three animators composited everything together using After Effects. The characters’ movements were left deliberately crude and over-simplified. "The animation wasn’t supposed to be sophisticated, so that’s where the humor comes from," Sewter notes. "When they walk, their legs don’t even move."
Including the location shoot, the entire project took about two months. Sewter notes that working in such a relatively low-tech medium was a nice departure from the usual reliance on computers and software. "It was refreshing," he says.
