Guinness
noitulovE
Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO
Guinness has a considerable advertising heritage. The brand has built a reputation for pithy taglines and equally striking imagery, stretching back to its earliest advertising slogans. So when Matt Doman and Ian Heartfield, creatives at Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO in London, were looking for inspiration for a new brief for the brand in 2005, they decided to look back to the company’s history. ‘We’d always liked Good Things Come To Those Who Wait,’ says Doman. ‘We thought it was the best campaign you could ever do for Guinness. So we asked whether there was a possibility of it coming back on the table.’
01-07 Stills from the finished Guinness commercial. The spot told a backwards story of evolution, beginning with three friends in a bar drinking Guinness, who are then shown zipping back through history, becoming chimpanzees, then birds, fish and finally mudskippers.
‘Good Things…’ was first introduced as a tagline by AMV BBDO about ten years previously, and referred to the notorious settling time that a pint of Guinness requires when bought in a pub. It had been attached to some of the brand’s most successful ads, including the 1999 Surfer ad, directed by Jonathan Glazer, which features the distinctive image of a group of white horses to demonstrate the power of the waves. ‘Good Things.’ had been dropped as a campaign when Guinness’s advertising went global, as the rest of the world uses a fast-flow system to pour the drink, making the sentence irrelevant. But as this new campaign was for the UK only, it was reasonable for Doman and Heartfield to suggest its return. ‘The idea was born out of the ultimate wait,’ continues Doman. ‘Weirdly, the ad came out pretty fully formed from what I remember.’
A clue to the ad’s theme is in its name, noitulovE, which is ‘Evolution’ spelt backwards. The spot opens on a group of three young men at a bar. As they take their first sip of Guinness, they are shown reversing out of the pub, down the street, and through history. We see them rapidly de-evolve, become Neanderthals, chimpanzees, then birds, fish, small dinosaurs and finally mudskippers, before the tagline arrives triumphantly on the screen. The ad may not be an accurate demonstration of reverse evolution, but it is certainly a striking one.
What appears a simple idea proved hugely complex to make. The first hurdle for the creatives was getting the ad past the research groups, a selection of people who are asked to react to a rough version of the spot. These opinions can determine whether an idea will even get out of the starting blocks. ‘To get stuff through research, it’s got to be up, feel-good,’ explains Heartfield. ‘Anything dark or edgy or weird makes people nervous, so it doesn’t ever get past that first group of people in a room. You have to play a slightly different game.’
‘It was a slightly unusual Guinness ad because it had a sense of humour to it, it was a vaguely witty ad. Guinness hadn’t done that before — everything had been very straight and serious.’
‘You have to do animatics [a rough mock-up of the ad with moving images] and storyboards, and carefully choose the music,’ continues Doman. ‘It’s almost like you don’t research the ad that you really want to make; you make an ad that’s good for research, and then you change it afterwards.’
The ad eventually went through four rounds of research as it was developed. By the second stage, Doman and Heartfield had chosen a director for the spot, who helped prepare the storyboards. From the get-go they knew they had an unexpected ad for the brand, requiring a particular type of director. ‘It was a slightly unusual Guinness ad because it had a sense of humour to it, it was a vaguely witty ad,’ they say. ‘Guinness hadn’t done that before – everything had been very straight and serious. We thought we couldn’t do better than Surfer – achingly cool, black and white, an amazing piece of cinematography – and we just thought no-one’s really done a light-hearted Guinness ad.’
The team also knew that the ad would require a director with vast skills in postproduction, in order to achieve the rapid evolutionary changes required by the narrative. This mixture of humour and post led them to Daniel Kleinman, who was known for his witty campaigns for brands including John West Salmon and Xbox (see page 128). ‘What you’ve got to be careful of with an idea like that is, if you haven’t got the money or the time behind it, it can really fall flat on its face,’ says Heartfield. ‘But knowing that you had someone of Kleinman’s calibre, who really wanted to do it, and do it well… once he was on board, you could relax to a certain extent.’
‘It was a really simple script,’ says Kleinman of first reading the idea. ‘You think it is so complicated, incorporating millions of years of history, but you can write it in three or four sentences. I think that’s the best sort of script. The moment I saw it, I thought “this could be great, this could be really interesting”. It threw up lots of visual stuff that I could get my teeth into.’
‘Every shot had a different technique. There was no one way of doing it from beginning to end; it’s almost as if every shot was treated like its own commercial in its own right.’
‘The challenge was to work out what the story was going to be,’ he continues. ‘From humans to Neanderthals was fairly easy… then they become chimps and then go up in the air… From then on we were just pulling ideas out of our heads, what would be funny. It’s not meant to be a history lesson; it’s not correct in a sense of Darwinian science – we probably weren’t ever fish or ostriches or whatever. I just wanted to try and get in many different types of environment, so you go in the trees, under the water, in the air, running over land, digging under the ground – to make it constantly surprising and interesting as you go along, and then it’s kind of funny as well.
‘It was great fun to work out and storyboard. But then comes the big major challenge, which is, “how the hell do we do it.?” Every single shot had lots and lots of different elements in it. I think one of the most interesting things about it, and innovative things, was there were more techniques than I’ve ever used before. Every shot had a different technique. There was no one way of doing it from beginning to end; it’s almost as if every shot was treated like its own commercial in its own right. Some of it is animation, some of it is in-camera stuff, some of it is make-up, some of it is time-lapse, some of it is composite stills – it was all sorts of different things all mashed together. In the end that gave it a kind of mad energy that seemed to work.’
Kleinman worked with William Bartlett at post-production house Framestore to create the many special effects within the ad. Some of the shots were created fairly conventionally – the team filmed time-lapse imagery in Iceland to get the background landscape shots, and the three men in the ad wore prosthetic costumes to become Neanderthals – but after that things became a little weirder.
08 Early storyboards for the noitulovE commercial by director Daniel Kleinman show how the ad was planned visually.
09-13 The three main actors on set, shown in full Neanderthal make-up, with director Daniel Kleinman (12) and also performing for the camera. In order to get the correct look for the backwards walk in the film, Kleinman actually had the actors walk forward dragging heavy weights, and then ran the resulting film backwards.
‘I never use special effects for their own sake. Narrative is the most important thing.’
14-15 The team discusses different shots for the commercial.
16-18 The chimpanzees are added to the scene in post-production; the three main actors shown on set filming the opening scene; early image showing the design for the bar.
‘Some of the rock erosion and volcanoes were created with a mixture of flour, yeast and mud all mixed up on a hot plate.’
19-22 The noitulovE spot incorporated some unusual special effects, including using a blow-torch to heat the leaves of a plant in order to make them gently sway, as if in a breeze, and filming a baked mixture of yeast, flour and mud for the volcano scenes.
23 The final shot in the ad shows the famous tagline, which was resurrected for this commercial after being dropped from the brand’s advertising for some time.
‘The edit isn’t just putting things in the right order — you’re still creatively making the narrative, in a literal sense.’
‘To create some of the plants moving, I experimented with using stop-frame animation and moving the plants by slightly heating up the leaves between each frame with a cook’s blow torch,’ says Bartlett. ‘This was fairly effective at giving an interesting movement. I also used scissors for variation.’
‘Some of the rock erosion and volcanoes were created with a mixture of flour, yeast and mud all mixed up on a hot plate and filmed stop frame against the back of my blue sofa at home,’ he continues. ‘The moving rocks in the background of the shot where the fish jumps backwards out of the pool onto dry land are a mixture of Special K cereal and Grape Nuts! I don’t want to make it sound as if the whole ad was created in this rather homemade way. Most of it was done with very sophisticated, cutting-edge technology on very expensive computers. I think it is the mix of styles and techniques that gives the ad its charm.’
One of the major aspects that Kleinman brought to the ad was an attention to detail, and a constant sense of experimentation, which led to other odd moments during the shoot. ‘There were subtle effects that worked quite well that you probably wouldn’t even notice,’ he says. ‘I wanted the cavemen and the people who were half-Neanderthal, half-monkey men to walk in a different way, so we got in a movement trainer who studies monkeys and chimps and trained the guys to move.’
The backwards momentum of the ad also threw up some unique problems, particularly as Kleinman was keen to avoid it looking simply as if the men were walking backwards at the start. ‘I wanted it to feel like there was almost a magnet behind them, pulling them backwards,’ he explains. ‘In order to do that, because I was running the film backwards, I had to get them to lean forwards and walk at a more extreme angle than you can physically walk, so I tied heavy weights behind them and got them to walk forward dragging these heavy weights, and then in post I took the weights away.’
Throughout the complex creation of the ad, Kleinman and the creatives had to show its development to the client, which was an uneasy procedure for all involved. ‘The edit process was several months,’ says Kleinman, ‘and it required a lot of handholding because you were looking at a shot and there’s nothing there. There’d be a timelapse still of an Icelandic landscape with a grey square flying through it to represent what might happen, and you’re showing this to people. The client was quite nervous, and they wanted to see it in all the stages as it progressed. They were seeing it in early stages, which normally you wouldn’t show people. In that sense they were very good, because they did trust us.’
‘The post was terrifying,’ agrees Ian Heartfield. ‘It builds in layers; it’s not like a live-action shoot where you’ll know whether you’ve got a good ad almost immediately. If it’s that amount of post, you don’t see how good it’s going to be until it’s really late.’
‘The way I explained it was that you do the shoot, but actually the shoot isn’t finished yet,’ says Kleinman, ‘because the edit and the special effects are still part of the shoot. You’re still creating the images, you’re still creating the characters and making them move and do all sorts of stuff that you would do on the shoot. The edit isn’t just putting things in the right order – you’re still creatively making the narrative, in a literal sense. But it was something I’d never done before, and perhaps no other commercial had had so many different techniques involved all at the same time before. It’s moving into new territory, which was exciting.’
Towards the end stages of making the ad, a major change was instigated. From the very beginning, the ad had been set to a particular piece of music, a track by Groove Armada. The piece had proved popular with everyone, from the research groups to the director, yet the team brought in musician Peter Raeburn to see if he might suggest any alternatives. He quizzed the team in depth about the ad and eventually returned with the Sammy Davis, Jr recording of Rhythm of Life, from the musical Sweet Charity. The track had a seismic effect. ‘It sounds like an exaggeration, but it remains for me the single best moment I’ve had in advertising, when he played this bit of music to that film, because it just changed it completely,’ says Heartfield. ‘I never would have got to that myself. It just changed everything, it really did.’
When talking about making noitulovE, the creatives talk about the ‘moons aligning’. Through having a great idea, for a prestigious client, they were able to get access to some of the most talented people working in advertising. But what is perhaps most interesting about noitulovE is that, despite it being such an effects-laden ad, which took so many hours in post-production to create, it is the humour that stands out most. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this was Kleinman’s intention all along. ‘I never use special effects for their own sake,’ he says. ‘Narrative is the most important thing. So all the effects are a means to an end, which is to make it a flowing, easy-to-watch, amusing thing.’