The cheeky cinema ad for Boots’ Natural Collection toiletries looks
like a piece of post-production trickery but, in fact, the director
stuck to the ’natural’ theme by shooting as much as possible using
’unproduced’ techniques.
To the sound of Kate Robbins singing Carioca, the ad features an
audience of grannies sipping tea in a restaurant, while a naked girl
cavorts underwater, pressing parts of her body against the walls of a
giant glass tank. The tagline is ’happy bits, happy self’ and the amount
of bare flesh on show prompted Boots’ agency, St Luke’s, to have the ad
classified by the British Board of Film Classification as a film, rather
than a commercial, to achieve a 12 certificate and reach the desired
audience.
The account director, David Pensell, explains: ’It was conceived as a
piece of cinema, to have a cultish appeal, and you need to see it in the
cinema to get the full effect.’
Written by Tim Hearn and art directed by Kate Stanners, the ad was
produced by James Bretherton and directed by Ringan Ledwidge for Tank
Films. ’Because we wanted to avoid using compositing techniques, we shot
the two main elements together,’ Ledwidge says. ’The girl, Marianne
Melhaus, is a dancer, and followed a choreographed set of movements. She
could stay underwater for several minutes, but it still took two days to
shoot.’
So that the shots of the restaurant and the tank were both properly
exposed, Ben Seresin, the photographer, used a dimming system which
reduced the lighting on the set as the shots zoomed in on the tank. Next
came the technical bit. Ledwidge had shot oils, glycerine, milk and
petrol being agitated by a stirrer. This ’texture’ footage was taken to
Smoke and Mirrors for compositing work by the Flame artist, Jon
Hollis.
’We used a different texture for each product in the Boots range,’
Ledwidge says, ’and since we had shot them at 150 frames per second, we
had the option of altering the speed to match the texture movements to
the model’s own.’
The ad aims to make young women feel good about their bodies, and
certainly did the trick for one girl - the model so impressed a visitor
from a nearby film set that she was offered a part in the new James Bond
movie.
