On Location

On a hot, sunny August afternoon in Long Island City, Queens, a creative team from TBWA\Chiat\Day, New York, literally watches paint dry at Broadway Stages. It's day two of a four-day production for Absolut vodka, and unlike most commercial shoots, this one employs two digital cameras, capturing the action at one frame every eight seconds, but there is very little action per se. The first-time commercial director, David Ellis, more commonly known in graffiti-art circles simply as "Squirm," is the frontman of a 30-odd-member collective of New York artists known as the Barnstormers. Two other members of the collaborative art team have been chosen for the job: Kenji Hirata and Maya Hayuk. Phil Frost, a New York artist independent of the Barnstormers, has also been commissioned for the project, which is being produced through Go Film in New York. On set, Frost, in baggy shorts, sneakers and a baseball cap, stands quietly in front of a 12-foot-tall red Plexiglass Absolut bottle, painstakingly brushing water-soluble paint into a geometric pattern of hearts that will eventually cover the bottle—a three-dimensional canvas for the artist's visual interpretation of the vodka's new Absolut Raspberri flavor. Frost, a self-taught artist originally from Albany, N.Y., creates a blossoming bouquet of orange, pink, blue and green. Agency group creative director Patrick O'Neill, copywriter Gail Barlow and art director Lauren Harwell watch the hearts slowly fill the bottle; months of research and preproduction work is coming to fruition. "We only have two more days of painting left," sighs Harwell, "and it breaks my heart." While there is a well-known vodka brand and multimillion-dollar media budget behind the commercials, the atmosphere is more that of an art installation in the making. Through time-lapse photography, each spot will show the creation of the advertising-as-art piece and end with the bottle being washed clean and the next artist beginning his or her interpretation. The Barnstormers are no strangers to the technique. The collective, formed in 1999 after 25 artists descended on Cameron, N.C., and painted dozens of barns and shacks, specializes in large-scale painting and performance-art collaborations. In 2000, they created Watching Paint Dry, a film that shows the time-lapse evolution of a painting done by 12 artists over two weeks. For the Absolut project, each artist appears in the ads painting the familiar bottle—an icon known to American consumers since 1981, when Absolut first started promoting the brand in print ads with an unadorned product shot framed by a halo of light, photographed by Steve Bronstein, and a clever headline. Absolut has featured the work of artists such as Andy Warhol and Keith Harding in its advertising but, until now, never the artists themselves. There is no makeup artist or stylist on set. "It's a come-as-you-are show," says O'Neill, explaining that all the elements had to remain authentic to maintain the artists' street credibility. "We want it to feel almost tribal and visceral," O'Neill says. "This is using the legacy of Absolut in a new way: less velvet rope and more of the people and raw." Over the course of the next few weeks, the photography will be cut into four 30-second commercials that will introduce the new vodka flavor on cable television this month. The ads represent the first U.S. TV work for Absolut. (The client has done TV ads for Level, its premium vodka, but never for the Absolut brand itself.) A print component broke in August magazines. After the artists have completed their work, editor Alex Lebedev of Origami Edit in New York will piece the spots together using the digital photos. The editing will take about three days with the software program Adobe After Effects. The complete project will also be featured as a two-and-a-half-minute film on the brand's Web site. The ads will include each artist's signature and be backed by a track from British beatbox musician Killa Kela, recorded in Vancouver at the tail end of a two-week post-production process. "Because this whole project is handmade, anything too instrumental felt false," says O'Neill. "Our musical choice needed to be as legitimate as the artists." Harwell selected the artists after a month of research in museums, galleries and on the Web. The goal was to choose people whose work would suit the "Unleash the raspberry" tagline. It was a coincidence that three of the four artists chosen from an original list of 50 were Barnstormers. "What they all have in common is their art has movement to it, a lot of motion and energy," Harwell says. For the launch, the creative team looked no further than the product and asked the artists to do the same. "The first thing we noticed about the vodka is that it has this very intense flavor of raspberry," says Harwell. "We're trying to express raspberry in a new way." The product, which began rolling out in August in key markets such as New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago and Boston, sports a bright, bold bottle design, with its crimson contours and Raspberri moniker. Absolut vp of marketing Matthias Aeppli describes the flavor as a "real fresh, fruity raspberry." Hayuk, a Baltimore native, arrives at the Queens soundstage for a second day to complete her blue-screen work while Frost paints his bottle. A writer, designer, photographer and illustrator, she joined the Barnstormers about two years ago when she moved to New York from San Francisco. She says her piece was inspired by the color of the bottle. "The first thing I saw was a gem, a ruby," says Hayuk, whose contribution shows gem shapes filling up the bottle, bursting out of the top and filling the environment around it. "I gave the impression that the bottle was crackling over, like the condensation was bubbling over. The rubies are all built up and are released." "It's complete creative freedom," says Ellis, who will paint his own version of Absolut Rasberri later in the week. A native of North Carolina now based in New York, he notes on a lunch break that, coincidentally, his father grows the berry fruit back home. This is the first ad project for the Barnstormers. "All artists find a way to make their art," says Ellis, adding that he turns down 95 percent of the projects he is offered. "You run the risk of overexposure," he explains. But the Absolut experience, says Hayuk, "feels more like mutual admiration than selling out. I look at it more as a foundation or grant than a big commercial job." After a day's work—nearly eight hours in front of the bottle—Frost will watch his work washed away, cleaned and cleared for the next artist. "I didn't get a chance to fully absorb it," Hayuk says of her day of painting. "By the time I got down from my euphoria, the bottle was already clean. It was freaky. I've never done a live painting before." To add to the street-theater nature of the campaign, wild postings of the ad series will include an unadorned version of the ad for passersby to try their hand. Hayuk, for one, is a convert of the concept. "I crave it," she says. "It makes me want to paint a building. The larger the surface, the better."

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On Location

Eleftheria Parpis

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Eleftheria Parpis