A Pitch for 'The Savourists'
As I was pitching my idea for the Nahemi Kodak Awards today, it is high time I present my idea to you as well, together with the brief, my sources of inspiration, issues to tackle for the production, and the overall development.
When the briefs from Nahemi Kodak arrived, we had four different products/campaigns to choose from: The Savourists’ snack bar and the ‘Wisdom Intense White’ whitening strips that came from the branding agency Libertine London, the NURSEM hand cream for nurses and midwives by the Mother agency and an online bullying awareness campaign for the NSPCC by TBWA/London agency.
Immediately, I knew that I wanted to develop an idea for The Savourists’ snack bar, as I had images popping up in my head. The brief for the Wisdom strips as well as the NURSEM brief did not really appeal to me as much. That only left the campaign against bullying to consider as well. While I find the cause important and the issue necessary to address, after a couple of days I decided that I was not going to pursue it further. For, while a lot of different ideas popped up for the savoury snack bar, I did not come up with an appropriate (and interesting) idea for the campaign. So I decided to focus my energy on The Savourists and looked at the brief again.
Looking at the Libertine London brief, a couple of keywords immediately stood out to me. Since the snack bar was supposed to be vegan, free of sugar and gluten, but savoury in taste, it was determined by the branding agency, that the snack bar was not intended for children. This was also based on the argument that the flavours were ‘rather sophisticated’ – which meant that sophistication was another aspect that they seemed to emphasise as well. However, the most important aspects that stood out to me were the words: ‘fun, humorous, and bold.’
I then turned to the design of the packaging of the snack bar (which we had received as an image alongside the brief) as it reminded me of something as well. Looking up different graphic designs online, I quickly found out that the design was based on Victorian graphic design, with its predominant colour palette of beige, black, and red and the bold but intricate lettering as well. This gave me a first idea for the story.
My initial idea was that of a man and a woman, dressed in Victorian style clothes, flirting with each other. While the man adheres to all the standards of dating of their time, the woman is bolder, sexually advancing him by slowly lifting her skirt. The man breaks into sweat, and faints before she is finished lifting her skirt. She winks into the camera, as she further lifts her skirt, revealing a Victorian style tattoo of the savoury snack bar.
This was how far I took the concept for boldness. However, after a couple of days thinking about the idea further, I was not really satisfied with it anymore. While it might have covered the sophistication aspect and the Victorian style, I found it different to combine this idea with the concept of a healthy but savoury snack bar. Which is why I did a more in-depth research of previous products Libertine London advertised to gauge what they would consider as bold.
And boy, what did I encounter! Libertine London has previously advertised the Spitfire Ale beverage, but with an unexpected twist to it. Since Spitfire Ale is being brewed in Kent, Libertine London used the Second World War battle with the German Luftwaffe at Kent as a vehicle to advertise this product. This advertisement entailed, amongst others, posters that state “Join the Battle for Freedom. If you don’t you is a lamer and a colossal gaylord.” as well as “Downed all over Kent, just like the Luftwaffe.’ and ‘Goering. Goering. Gone.’ making fun of the supreme commander of the German Luftwaffe Hermann Göring. This campaign helped me understand that Libertine London writes bold in capital letters. It also taught me that they were indeed drawing on British history to convey their story and that costumes were an important part of their campaigning.
This, in combination with the Victorian style wrapper design, inspired a totally new idea; one that I ended up going for:
Mr. Todd and Mrs. Lovett encounter a major problem: Their joint venture has plunged into an economic slump and no one wants to eat their infamous pies anymore. As they are about to close down their pie shop, an eager street vendor comes along and hands them (a leaflet for a) snack bar. Both have a flash of inspiration… and are able to revive their business by selling savoury snack bars. As the camera pans out, you can see that they hid the clothes of the street vendor.
The logline to go along with this was: So savoury, you could kill for it.
Basing the story on the urban legend of Sweeney Todd and applying it to the advertisement for a savoury snack bar was as bold as I thought I could get. However, I had the feeling that this could be too bold, even for the infamous black humour of the Brits. After I pitched the idea to one of my lecturers on Friday, he voiced the same concerns and suggested to come up with an alternative in case it was too dark and bold for the client. So over the weekend, I pondered about the idea and the right logline to go along with it. Since the savoury snack bars do not contain any meat at all but are rather vegan, I decided to change the ending, the title, and the logline to the street vendor actually staying alive but being captured. So while the story descripting above now replaced the last sentence with ‘But don’t you worry, the street vendor is still gagged up in the cellar.’
It was then just a question of finding a befitting logline and after much consideration, I opted to go for ‘So savoury, it renders you speechless.’ But instead giving the ad itself a title that summarises the change of paradigm for Sweeney Todd from meat to veganism: “The Vegan Solution.”
After conceiving this idea, I had to settle the main questions and issues, as well as decide upon a visual style (and the relevant film stock to go along with it). Issues that immediately came to my mind was taking hold of costumes and locations as well as creating the necessary props in case the snack bar really wasn’t available on the market by the time we filmed the ad.
The issue with the snack bar seemed to have settled itself, as I learned in the course of last week, that the snack bar was supposed to be launched on the market in mid-November, which would still give us plenty of time to film and buffs the production value if we waited for it to use as a prop. However, if, for any reason, the snack bar should not be available in time for our shoot, we would be able to either revert back to a mock-up leaflet of the snack bar and incorporate the logo of the bar itself onto the leaflet, or superimpose the logo of it at the end or create a mock-up of a snack bar to use as a prop.
For the costumes, I asked one of our lecturers for the person in charge of the costumes at our Costume Design department and contacted her to ask for any available Victorian style costumes and whether I could have a look at them. After a quick back-and-forth, I was able to have a look at the two costumes for women they had and enquire not only the size, but also the approximate time for amending them. Since we were still lacking at least one male costume, I looked up a rental service for costumes in the UK and found Complete Costumes, which offered really good-looking costumes for between £35-45 per piece for a rental period of about a week.
After the costumes and the ‘product to prop’-issue was settled, I was only left with the locations and possible production design issues. For the exterior scenes, I wanted to take the Victorian street set in the sound stage, and for the interior scenes, I wanted to revert to the room set, which is also in the sound stage, and possibly have it redressed. For production design elements, as well as possible redressing, I was able to bring in fellow student Tyler from LVL5 Production Design who has previous experience with Victorian style element and was delighted at the prospect to help me out. She estimated that the most important props: The shop sign and the leaflet would amount to about £20-30 in price.
For the visual style, I decided to settle on filming in black and white and adding a Sin City-like colour splash effect in red onto the product itself. This, I not only envisioned as being visually interesting and an homage to Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, but also as another way of visually replicating the Victorian graphic design of the flyers (and the Savourists’ bar). This would require us to film on Eastman Double-X Black and White Negative Colour film 7222 and use a rather contrasty lighting to emphasise the initial eeriness of the story and create even more tension.
With all this background issues taken care of, I created the pitch as you can see in the slide show below:
Since Sweeney Todd started out as an urban legend already back in the Victorian era, the copyright was not much of an issue. This is also warranted by the fact that the characters of Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett have been repeatedly used in many different franchises over the past decades.
In order to make sure that I was within legal requirements and my ad remained in good taste, I tried looking up the Advertising Standards Authority’s (ASA) website and to look a bit deeper into the particularities of advertising. However, when trying to look up the relevant advertising codes on several different occasions, the page would not load and instead send the error code 104. So I will have to either look them up at a later date or find another way to find out the codes to ensure that I will be within the legal limits of producing commercials.
However, at the end of today, I learned that my pitch was taken as one of three ideas that we will be filming, so I am more than happy to get started. While I will definitely be working as a producer for one of the other ideas, I am happy that I can experiment as a cinematographer on my own idea, even though I had to wave goodbye to the idea of filming with black and white-footage - it was sadly not listed on the stock order form Nahemi Kodak wants us to fill out.
Well, it cannot run smoothly all the time, can it? More of a challenge for me then!
References:
Anonymous (n.d.) Untitled [online] Image taken from: http://www.icollector.com/Sweeney-Todd-The-Demon-Barber-of-Fleet-Street-Mrs-Lovett-s-Meat-Pie_i21745006 [Accessed on 21 October 2018]
Complete Costumes (2018) Barber Sweeney Todd Costume [online] Images taken from: http://complete-costumes.co.uk/costume-search/costume_details.php/item/1104/Men's_Victorian_Edwardian_Working_Class_Poor_Man_Barber_Sweeney_Todd_Costume_Size_M_-_L.html [Accessed on 21 October 2018]
Complete Costumes (2018) Poor Man Costume Sweeney Todd [online] Images taken from: http://complete-costumes.co.uk/costume-search/costume_details.php/item/2579/Men's_Victorian_Edwardian_Working_Class_Poor_Man_Costume_Sweeney_Todd_Size_M-L.html [Accessed on 21 October 2018]
French, N. (2014) Designing a Typographic Victorian Ad [online] Image taken from: https://www.lynda.com/Illustrator-tutorials/Welcome/155652/164905-4.html [Accessed on 21 October 2018]
Kodak (2018) Eastman Double-X Black and White Negative Film 5222 / 7222[online] https://www.kodak.com/GB/en/motion/Products/Production/5222/default.htm [Accessed on 21 October 2018]
Libertine London (2018) Spitfire Premium Ale [online] Images taken from: http://www.libertinelondon.com/2013/12/spitfire/ [Accessed on 21 October 2018]
MovieStillsDB (2009) Untitled [online] Image taken from: https://www.moviestillsdb.com/movies/sweeney-todd-the-demon-barber-of-fleet-street-i408236/00837131 [Accessed on 21 October 2018]
Ostrow, J. (2016) Sweeney Todd at DCPA is a rewarding version of the Sondheim Classic [online] Image taken from: https://www.denverpost.com/2016/04/18/sweeney-todd-at-dcpa-is-a-rewarding-version-of-the-sondheim-classic/ [Accessed on 21 October 2018]
ScreenMusings (n.d.) Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) [online] Image taken from: https://screenmusings.org/movie/dvd/Sweeney-Todd-The-Demon-Barber-of-Fleet-Street/pages/Sweeney-Todd-The-Demon-Barber-of-Fleet-Street-0096.htm [Accessed on 21 October 2018]
Snook, A. (2011) Historical Type 19th Century Advertising Boom [online] Image taken from: http://ashtongraphicdesign.blogspot.com/2011/11/historical-type.html [Accessed on 21 October 2018]
TheHorrorHoneys (n.d.) Untitled [online] Image taken from: http://www.thehorrorhoneys.com/2013/10/never-forget-never-forgive-sweeney-todd.html [Accessed on 21 October 2018]
Victoria and Albert Museum (n.d.) Theatre Posters: 19th Century Theatre Posters [online] Image taken from: http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/t/theatre-posters/ [Accessed on 21 October 2018]