If you were to predict one color for Gordon’s gin to opt for, you would probably suggest the lovely green of its bottle. But you’d be wrong. In this monotone ad, they opt for blue and white instead, co-opting the graphic language of a painting by numbers book and showing an exquisite amount of thoughtful detail as it does so. With a catch line ‘It’s what goes into Gordon’s that gives it its colorful flavor,’ this is a striking, elegant ad which should cut through the visual noise and clutter elsewhere on air.

Director John Robertson explains how they did it:
‘The commercial uses a combination of live action, CG animation, stills photography and 2D animation to achieve its graphic look. Our first job was to plan and time all the shots. The storyboard was a crucial part of this process and after boarding lots of ideas we probably used only half of them. One of the reasons for this was that the actions become more difficult to read once the live action has been treated to look like a painting by numbers book, so we had to slow down the shots so that they could be read properly.

‘When the board was approved by the agency and client, we either shot each scene in live action or built it in CG. The people and street scenes are live action, the fly through over the Thames is CG. The backgrounds were a mixture of photographic stills, photomontage or drawn. The ‘painting by numbers’ look itself was achieved by using a plug-in for Tinderbox called Contour which put a contour line around posterized tones on each composited image. These contour lines were then used as a guide for the rotoscoped drawings, which were like a skin placed on top of the composited live action and CG. A team of 14 animators took 5 weeks to produce the rotoscoped drawings.

Client: Diageo
Advertising Agency: Bartle Bogle Hegarty
Art Director: Dave Monk
Copy Writer: Matt Waller
Agency Producer: Richard Spalding
Music: Pictures of Matchstick Men, Status Quo
Voiceover: Terence Stamp
Production Company: Passion Pictures
Director: John Robertson
Illustrators: Dylan Down, Peter Richardson, Ian Bull, Andrew McLaughin
CG Modelling: Stuart Rowbottom, Niklas Anderson, Chris Hemming.