Kodak Delves Deeper

Saatchi & Saatchi focuses on small moments, such as a guy and girl exchanging smiles, in a new campaign for Kodak disposable cameras that breaks today.

One TV spot features a Goth-like girl with long black hair, a ghost-white face and black clothes, while another stars a girl with blue-tinted hair that sticks up and out.

In “Goth,” the girl snaps pictures in odd places, such as down a manhole and under a fishnet, and pastes them into an album, which she shows to her class. Most of her peers recoil at the bizarre images, but one scruffy-looking guy just smiles.

The girl in “Tribes” takes shots of cheerleaders, football players and punk rockers and turns them into a collage on a school bulletin board. The display attracts various students, including a punk rocker and a cheerleader, who again exchange smiles.

The New York shop’s effort, which includes print ads, introduces the theme, “Capture what’s inside you.” The core target continues to be teens in junior high and high school.

Prior work, tagged, “Grab one and hold on,” showed humorous moments, such as a girl photographing a guy in his boxer shorts. This time, the goal was to “get deeper with emotional connections,” said Mike Burns, a managing partner at Saatchi, who steers the Kodak account. The cameras, he added, become a “vehicle for self-expression,” while the characters are meant to represent junior-high and high-school archetypes.

The spots, directed by documentary filmmaker Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line, A Brief History of Time), were shot over four days in Sydney, Australia, said Saatchi’s Mark Cacciatore, who shared creative director duties with Mariano Favetto. The art director was Carlos Figueiredo; the copywriter, Larissa Kirschner.

A budget was not available. Last year, Rochester, N.Y.-based Kodak spent more than $20 million on disposable cameras, according to CMR.