Guinness commercial

Friday, March 20, 2009

Posted by Anonymous

I was really lucky to have had the opportunity to work on the art department of the latest Guinness commercial. It was an awesome experience and I met a lot of awesomely nutty people. I worked with the fabulous people at Gyro constructivists for a day, making a rocket ship for the commercial. The theme of the commercial was ''creation'' well that's what we were guessing anyway. The rocket ship was made to look like a little boy made it from spare parts in his back yard. I've got to say that the rocket ship looked amazing! I only made an extremely small part of it, which took me ages! I'm not sure if it even made the final cut, I was such a little baby snail in comparison to these awesome prop makers who have at least 25 years + experience under their belts, and can whip up anything in a matter of two minuets. The workshop at gyro is very cool with a large wood work area, a metal room and resin room....mmmm candy!

For the rest of the time on the commercial I worked on the grass. It was a pretty huge and tedious job of two 8 by 4 metre pieces of ashtro turff hung from the ceiling and about twenty or so of us on either side cutting holes and threading longer pieces of grass through and gluing the back. The aim is that it would look like wild uncut grass.





Although this part of the job was a weee bit tedious, its amazing who you meet working in art departments, I even bumped into old buddies from art school and had a good old yarn whilst discussing our process to getting as much done in a day as we could. Mine was slice, thread a small patch, then glue, then thread another patch while waiting for the glue to dry on previous patch, then cut ends off glued patch and repeat, while having an awesome conversation with anybody, sometimes everybody, about anything really.

Its safe to say that we left everyday with multiple fingers bandaged from these "processes" of ours, but it was great!! I would highly recommend art department work if you can get any, it really makes you aware how many people are behind the scenes gutting their fingers on any film work. Also how pressing the time frames are to get your bit done on time, to get it to the next department and so on.