A man pedals all around the world on his bike delivering gluten-free bread in a charming new spot for Dow created by Draftfcb Chicago and directed by Nicolai Fuglsig of bicoastal/international MJZ.
It’s a lovely journey made all the more remarkable by the fact that he is balancing a 12-foot high stack of bread on his head as he makes his rounds, with the help of the artisans from the New York office of visual effects house The Mill, which also has full-service studios in Los Angeles and London.
Aptly titled “Bread,” the spot clocks in at just over a minute and is part of a campaign (Fuglsig also shot another commercial titled “Train”) that strives to establish Dow as not merely a chemical company but a place that provides solutions impacting our lives in ways that we might not expect–like helping to make gluten-free bread that doesn’t taste like it is gluten-free.
“The whole campaign is based on making the solution the star in a way that makes people say, ‘Wow, that’s pretty interesting. I didn’t know Dow was involved in that,’ ” according to Draftfcb executive VP/group creative director Jon Flannery.
Terin Izil, a copywriter on the Draftfcb creative team, came up with the clever idea to have a cyclist balancing a giant stack of bread on his head to help illustrate this point.
“Her family comes from Turkey, and, apparently, they actually do carry bread like this. Maybe not in 12-foot stacks,” Draftfcb’s Flannery said, “but that’s where the idea had started.”
Balancing act Fuglsig, who was not available for an interview at press time, relied on artisans from The Mill to make it look as though the cyclist was performing the amazing feat of balance–not to mention incredible endurance–we see played out in the commercial.
At the outset of the project, it was thought that a rig could be built on the bike to support a fiberglass bread stack that had been built for the shoot, explained The Mill’s Corey Brown, lead 2D artist, Flame compositor and VFX shoot supervisor. But the enormous weight of the bread stack made this impossible, so it was cut into smaller sections, each about three feet high, and The Mill later supplemented the stack in post, depending on how much of it was used during a particular shot.
“Because of the complexities of the terrain and safety of the rider, many of the more complex shots were with a stripped down bike and little more than a large disk on the rider’s head,” Brown shared.
Fuglsig and cinematographer Dion Beebe shot “Bread”–and “Train”–on location in Brazil because the country provided a range of geography and people of varying ethnicities.
“Obviously, the geography was important to us because we wanted to make it look like the guy was leaving his village to travel the world,” Flannery said, noting, “Sao Paolo also has one of the world’s largest Asian populations outside of Asia–the pagoda in the spot is an existing structure. Definitely not the kind of thing you’d expect to find near a major Latin American city, but it’s real.”
The only major work The Mill had to do in terms of altering the environment involved the scene designed to represent Paris.
It was filmed in failing light in the back streets of Santa Teresa in Rio de Janeiro, Brown said, and needed quite a bit of work to make it feel more European, including the removal of many of the overhead cables and the addition of awnings and signs.
The visual effects crew had a little inside joke fun with that particular segment, naming a Parisian café Le Moulin–that’s The Mill in French for you non-francophones.
“I can’t say enough about the work The Mill did in post,” praised Draftfcb sr. VP/creative director Doug Behm. “That really is where everything had to come together. Everything had to work or else we’d be stuck with something pretty mediocre and disappointing. But they nailed it. Pretty cool and confidently, too.”
Backstory Rick Russell of Final Cut, which has offices in New York, London and Los Angeles, cut “Bread,” crafting a heartfelt narrative out of the cyclist’s inspired and captivating journey.
“We wanted to give the story a beginning and a little implied backstory. That’s why we started [the journey] in the village with the send-off from the townspeople,” Flannery shared.
He explained, “This is a big deal to this little village. They’re proud and hopeful. They’re sending off one of their very own–you can imagine him as the youngest son of the town baker–out into the world to deliver their best bread.”
Music was also key to ensuring that “Bread” would connect properly with viewers. The agency needed to find a song that would support the cyclist’s whimsical mission and listened to hundreds of tracks before eventually finding “I Can” on the Minnutes album Pretty Baby.
The track clearly struck a responsive chord with the agency creative team on different levels.
“One of the things that’s great about the track is that I don’t think it’s what you’d expect for a spot like this,” Flannery related.
“It works for the commercial, but there’s a contrast, and that’s what’s so good, I think, because instead of the song just emphasizing what you’re seeing on the screen, it really brings another layer or something added to the overall experience.”
