A taste of the extraordinary: the making of Drambuie's surreal ad

By Georgina Brazier, brandrepublic.com, Monday, 12 November 2012 04:00PM

Drambuie gives Brand Republic a taste behind the scenes of its latest ad "the extraordinary bar", designed to unnerve and lift viewers out of the comfort of "the ordinary".

Drambuie: 'a taste of the extraordinary' campaign

The ad by Drambuie's agency Sell! Sell! can be seen at the end of the video above, at 3.57. It opens in an unusual bar filled with surreal characters that have been designed to instil a sense of other worldliness.

Chino Moya, the ad's Spanish director, drew on influences from Surrealist cinema, art and literature to create the film. He said: "We lit everything from below so all the light comes from below and creates these kind of strange shadows on his face. Plus also these two lamps that instead of projecting light what they are doing is projecting shadows. It's a combination of wide-angled lenses and useful angles and this kind of expressionist lighting."

Chris Allen, VFX supervisor from MPC, describing the shoot of one short scene, said : "We had to take the studio footage which was shot with our guy with the egg on his back and a couple of trees all shot against green screen.

"We then take the footage and we apply a black and white grey to it to wash out the colour. Once we've done the grade, we take it into our Flame where we cleaned up the main plate. There was some unwanted dirt.

"They wanted to take out one of the trees so we prepped the plate and then we take a still image of a desert location, we extend the floor, then we add back in the sky. We then had to defocus the whole image just to give it some depth. Once we'd done that we then applied final master grade just to help bed the whole thing back together and we end up with this lovely final shot."

This article was first published on brandrepublic.com