By Christine Champagne

Carlton Draught, a pale lager from Australia, has a history of relying on humor in its advertising. In fact, the Made From Beer campaign, created by Clemenger BBDO, Melbourne, and launched in 2003, is famous for advertisements poking fun at everything from big-budget commercials to movies like Flashdance.
   “The strategy has always been centered around Carlton Draught being unpretentious, not taking itself too seriously–a good honest beer with nothing to prove,” according to Clemenger BBDO executive creative director Ant Keogh, who further noted, “But we didn’t want to say that directly because it sounds awful. So instead we demonstrate the attitude with a ridiculous line like ‘Made From Beer’ and by making fun of other pretentious or clichéd advertising or films.”
    Keeping in the spirit of the campaign, Carlton Draught’s latest commercial, “Beer Chase,” takes great pleasure in spoofing the over-the-top car chases seen in Hollywood theatrical feature films and television shows ranging from Starsky and Hutch (both the film and television versions) to Beverly Hills Cop and its sequels.
    As we see in the 1:30 version of the spot on YouTube (a :60 version was made for television), a group of naughty mates has just robbed a bank and are celebrating their big score at a local bar when the bartender tips them off to the fact that the establishment happens to be full of police officers. The criminals, who weren’t smart enough to hide the incriminating duffel bag of cash they have at their feet, then have a decision to make: Should they drop the Carlton Draughts they have been enjoying and hop into their getaway car, or should they keep a firm grip on their beers and flee on foot?
    Unable to part with their Carlton Draughts, the gang chooses to escape on foot with their beverages in hand–a most comical sight indeed.
    Director Steve Ayson, who is represented by bicoastal/international The Sweet Shop, orchestrates a spectacularly ridiculous chase that finds cops being sidelined after colliding with panes of glass and piles of boxes as the robbers sprint on.
    At one point, the gang of thieves quietly busts through a police roadblock in slow motion. Seeing the oncoming criminals, a police officer is heard saying words to the effect that “they’re not stopping” which is cue for the police barricade to give way or more accurately for the cops to merely step aside and let the bad guys pass.

L.A. lensing    The director, cinematographer Greig Fraser and production designer Robbie Freed shot “Beer Chase” on location in Los Angeles this past July over three long days.
    The ad agency creatives had all the vignettes planned and detailed in the script, although they were open to Ayson’s suggestions.
    “In the end the only one I added was the running in the L.A. River Basin scene. Other than that we went with the script as the vignettes they wrote were all very pure to the car chase genre,” Ayson shared. “We had to rush across Los Angeles to get the River Basin shot, a mission in four vans. I helped kick stones out of the way so the talent didn’t sprain an ankle and was about to kick a tied-up plastic shopping bag, but for some reason I stopped myself. On further inspection it had some very suspect matter in it, so I used a stick. It was lovely down there.”
    The original intention was to shoot the commercial in Australia, but the creative team realized that if they were going to parody the Hollywood car chase, they ought to go to what Clemenger BBDO copywriter Richard Williams described as “the car chase capital of the world.”
    But the decision to shoot in Los Angeles required the creative team work out the internal logic of the ad, with the main question being: Is this story now set in Australia or America? Ultimately the Clemenger BBDO creative ensemble opted to go for a mix of both.
    “In the end we decided, in a story sense, we should start in ‘Australia,’ and then when they leave the pub take poetic license using all those Los Angeles setups as if the characters find themselves in a kind of film world,” Keogh explained.
    “For the most part we didn’t use distinctive landmarks,” continued exec creative director Keough. “We just wanted that location to play out in an almost subliminal way so it felt right for a car chase, and hopefully you didn’t think about it too much.”

A beer chaser    So were the guys really sprinting with glasses full of beer (that would be impressive), or were they toting more stable concoctions less likely to spill?
    “For any of the close-ups we had real beer. And for the actual running shots we had to use a bit of film magic, cling film magic to be exact,” Clemenger BBDO art director Anthony Phillips revealed.
    Meanwhile, there aren’t any drawbridges in Los Angeles (the robbers leap off one and land on a party boat at the end of the commercial), so Ayson shot live elements of bridges and Sydney-based Fin Design + Effects worked their 3D magic to create the desired effect.
    Jack Hutchings of Melbourne’s The Butchery cut “Beer Chase.”
    “We always had a pretty clear version of how the vignettes would edit together. The toughest part was trying to squeeze everything in without the ad becoming a mess,” Williams said. “In the end we lost one scenario, which worked well in the script but broke up the flow of the edit.”
    And that earnest but incredibly cheesy tune from the ’80s that accompanies the action? It is called “Thunder in Your Heart.” A rendition of that song performed by Stan Bush was featured in the commercial.

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