Tiger Beer has the right Sweet Shop ingredients in new blockbuster via Saatchi & Saatchi Malaysia
Saatchi & Saatchi Malaysia’s Tiger Beer spot, ‘Ingredients’ marks the first time collaboration between the agency and burgeoning kiwi director Dylan Pharazyn of The Sweet Shop.
Pharazyn loved the script and his vision for it clearly caught the eye of senior art director Nas Keng and the team at Saatchi & Saatchi. Pharazyn was thrilled to win the pitch as he explains: “It was clear from the first call that we were all on the same page wanting to make this spot truly outstanding. Unique visual ideas like this are rare and for me, this one ticked all the boxes.”
Certainly the script contained a sensibility already present in Pharazyn’s own projects. “Ingredients” offered the opportunity to harness his love of surreal/abstract imagery and render it to a very high standard. But it wasn’t always plain sailing as he explains: “The last barley left un-harvested in the world was in Gore, South Island, New Zealand and given that I wanted to capture this in-camera for a more natural look, we had to really rush to get it in time …thankfully the weather held.”
Collaborating with the team at Digital Post, he spent many weeks in post finessing the shot footage and combining it with a mix of stock, CGI and matt paintings to create bewitchingly organic floating cubes that fluidly blend to make a Tiger Beer bottle.
Undaunted by the complexities of the process, he particularly enjoyed figuring out how to shoot the barley cubes. Says Pharazyn: “This was fun! Effectively we created all the top edges of the cube in-camera by roping down sections of barley to give us flat surfaces in both directions. The back edges were shot with a blue screen slotted in behind. Once we had all edges, the middle section was cut out in flame…so the high angle shot is all in camera with some 3D particle simulation to give it energy.”
The dreamy result paints Tiger Beer as very pure and elemental – just what the agency ordered.
Pharazyn continues to direct commercials and develop his film projects in conjunction with The Sweet Shop.
TITLE: ‘Ingredients’ director cut
Client/Product: Tiger Beer
Agency: Saatchi & Saatchi Malaysia
Senior Copywriter: Alex Wong
Senior Art Director: Nazly Kasim
Agency Producer: Keng Kee
Production Company: The Sweet Shop
Director: Dylan Pharazyn
Producer: Fiona King
DoP: Ginny Loane
Art Director: Peter Marshall
Editor: Michael Lonsdale @The Sweet Shop
Post Production: Digital Post Auckland
8 Comments
I thought Y&R had Tiger Beer now?
Shame there’s no idea in it.
Quite different, in a good way. If you ever worked on beer, you know you always get the dreaded ‘ingredients’ brief eventually. I think it’s interestiing to watch. well executed.
The copy is fucking horrible. What does “winning” line have to do with anything?
Ugh. No wonder this agency has no clients.
Makes Adrian Miller look like a rock star. And the headline on the article promised so much. Misleading advertising?
I agree with the director. It ticked a lot of boxes for me too.
Borrowed-idea Box (tick)
Self-indulgent Nonsense Box (tick)
Illogical-pay-off Box (tick)
Stock-shot-waterfall-visual Box (tick)
Hackneyed-visual-of-hand-rubbing-wheat-stalks Box (tick)
Cliché-visual-of-pieces-of-earth-floating-through-air Box (tick)
Instantly-forgettable-music Box (tick)
Lot of anti saatchi vibes these days….let us remember that when an agency does well, it benefits a lot of people, so we should be cheering them instead of jeering.
Admittedly, it takes a fair amount of labour to bring a baby into the world. But just because you’ve strained and pushed for a long time doesn’t mean you’ve produced a baby, does it? No. What you’ve produced here, Tiger Beer, is really a collossal turd. We understand your relief that it’s over. And we appreciate what you went through. But if you’d care to look up from passing those congratulatory cigars, you’d notice the rest of Asia bracing itself for a stink.