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The "Fish" commercial. The embodiment of TED. |
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Every so often a commercial comes along that's a little bit special. Sometimes it's humour that makes it memorable; sometimes it's a jingle or slogan that lodges in the public consciousness; and once in a while it's something that's rather less easy to define...
Call it beauty, call it boldness, call it wonder; a few commercials present you with a set of images so striking that you watch them again and again just for the sheer pleasure of what you're seeing. In the past, Framestore CFC has helped create some of these memorable spots - Guinness 'Surfer' and Levi's 'Odyssey', for instance. Now 'Fish', a new spot for Johnnie Walker whisky, is the first contender for 'spot-you-most-hope-to-see-again' in 2003.
'Fish' starts with the camera moving over the surface of a blue-green ocean. It submerges and we catch our first glimpses of what appear to be multitudes of shoaling fish. The images are familiar from nature documentaries - the 'fish' darting in different directions, the many acting as one, the shoal seeming almost an entity in itself. As the camera closes in on the shoal, we realise that the creatures we are seeing are not fish but people - arms by their sides, legs together - driving themselves through the water with great speed and grace.
The pace picks up as we see the people near the surface, and then they start to leap out of the water. From above we see not one or two, but many, many men and women shooting out of the water like dolphins playfully racing each other. It is exhilarating and impossible. We finally return under the water, now in the shallows. One of the men touches his foot down onto the white sand. He stands up. He walks forward onto the beach of a tree-lined bay, others emerging to follow him. As he moves purposefully inland, we fade to black and the slogan 'Keep Walking'. This brief description of the action of the spot barely does justice to the beauty and power of the images - you really do have to see it to get it.
'Fish' was directed by Daniel Kleinman and produced by Spectre for BBH. The script arrived at Framestore CFC in August 2002. Several weeks of planning followed, with Framestore CFC Inferno artists on board as Co-Supervisors. Australia was finally selected as the location for the shoot - the rig designers down-under had come up with some really elegant and practical solutions to the problems posed by the 'racing dolphin' shots.
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