Hybrid production studio Vitamin has teamed with DDB Chicago, on a multimedia campaign promoting the 2009 Chicago International Film Festival (CIFF) in which the power of cinema is symbolized by the fleeting movements of a single human eye.
The unusual and highly affecting film consists almost entirely of a close-up of a woman’s eye as she gazes at a movie screen. The eye is shot in time-lapse and undergoes a panoply of emotions from laughter to tears while bathed in the projector’s reflected light. The festival’s logo-a stylized drawing of a female eye-appears at the end along with the tag, “take a deeper look.”
Vitamin creative director Danny DelPurgatorio and his team of artists distilled nearly two hours of time-lapse footage to form the film’s 45 second span. They used a Panasonic HD camera to record a model sitting in a chair rigged to prevent head movement while a projector cycled through film clips.
“We had her looking into the camera the whole time,” DelPurgatorio recalls. “We called out different emotions for her to play from and had her follow the movements of a hand to make it appear as though she was scanning the screen.”
“The agency had a great idea that ties into the festival logo and captures the movie-going experience in a unique and compelling way,” DelPurgatorio adds.
The Vitamin team also designed the idiosyncratic reveal of the festival tagline. “We hand drew the logo, then shot it with a reverse stop motion process,” DelPurgatorio says.
DelPurgatorio said that the film’s distinctive concept made it a lot of fun for the Vitamin crew to work on. “It was a very collaborative process and the agency was very open to our ideas,” he notes. “We played around with it a lot on the front end and everyone got something they were happy with in the end.”
Credits
DDB Worldwide Chicago
Jim Larmon – VP, Group Creative Director
Andrew Holton – Copywriter
Devin Grimes – Art Director
Liat Ebersohl – Executive Producer
Matt Green – Associate Producer
Vitamin
Daniel DelPurgatorio: Director
Rob Foster: Art Director
Matt Beharry: Art Director
Mary O’Gara: Executive Producer
Vitamin is located at 232 East Ohio Street, Chicago, Illinois 60611. For more information, call 312.664.6683 or visit www.vitaminpictures.tv.
