It looks like just another romantic story playing out on a bus. Young couple. Lighthearted moment. Ice cream. But in an instant, it all changes. As the pair bite into their full-colour Cornetto Black and White ice cream, the world becomes inverted black and white.
When Sweet Spot Content received the brief from agency Lowe and Partners, they were given the opportunity to really experiment with the visual medium of black and white, challenged to create a ‘different’ world that would emulate the experience of eating and enjoying a Cornetto Black and White ice cream.
“I was excited by the possibilities of black and white, of the negative image and of giving it a really bold look. At the same time, I wanted to make sure the romantic notion was still alive, that the look didn’t overtake the emotion and that there was still some softness to it,” says director/director of photography Miles Goodall.
And so Goodall creates a bold and very graphic look that shows the viewer a spectacular moment in time. They chose the location of an open-top bus specially constructed by Metrobus and, exploring the streets of Johannesburg and Sandton from this vantage point, away from all the clutter and chaos, Goodall brings to life amazing backgrounds with unusual buildings and images.
The most difficult part for the film art director Jeremy Argue was having to think-translate everything first in black and white, and then to re-imagine it all reversed out white and black. “Add to that the parts that were going to be rendered in infra-red black and white, and one had a real head-splitter!” he says.
And once filming was wrapped, it was time for the post-production artistry to add that extra bit of imagination to the world of Cornetto. The Black Ginger team turned the colourfully filmed world into a high-contrast black and white one. The graphic world envisioned at the beginning came to life with empty burned-white space and solid black shapes. To maintain the beauty of the images when they were inverted, certain aspects such as nostrils, eyes and open mouth were retouched, ensuring that it didn’t look “too strange”. And to round it off, giving the world the ideal level of “different”, an infrared effect was added – turning it into an almost ice cream-like place.
Sweet Spot Content Production team
Producer: Linda Notelovitz
Production Manager: Peta Sacke
Production Coordinator: Thembela Ndyalivane
Director (DoP): Miles Goodall
Advertising Agency – Lowe and Partners
Executive Creative Director: Peter Badenhorst
Creative Consultant: Alan Bunton
Senior Art Director: Gavin Dexter
Senior Copywriter: Stephen Pollock
Head of Account Management: Sylvia Swart
Managing Director: Sarah Dexter
TV Producer: Juliet Curtis
