Carlton Draught – Big Ad
Agency: George Patterson and Partners, Melbourne
Creative Director: James McGrath
Art Director: Grant Rutherford
Writer: Ant Keogh
Producer: Pip Heming
Group Communications Director: Paul McMillan
Production: Plaza Films
Director: Paul Middleditch
Executive Producer: Peter Masterton
DOP: Andrew Lesnie (Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring)
Post- Production: Animal Logic (The Matrix)
VFX Supervisor: Andrew Jackson
Senior Compositor: Angus Wilson
VFX Producer: Caroline Renshaw
Editor: Peter Whitmore
Music: Cezary Skubiszewski
Location: Queenstown, New Zealand
Cast: 300 locals (consisted mainly of backpackers)
It’s a big ad!
Very big ad!
It’s a big ad we’re in!
It’s a big ad!
My God it’s big!
Can’t believe how big!
For Carlton Draught!
It’s just so freaking huge!< It’s a big ad!
Expensive ad!
This ad better sell some blooooooody beer!
Two armies, one dressed in maroon, the other in yellow, march toward one another singing the advertisement’s lyrics to the melody of “O Fortuna” from Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. A heroic figure on horseback leads charge. Viewed from the air, the armies form a glass of Carlton Draught and a human body. The glass is then lifted to the mouth, and the audience sees the “beer”—rushing, ecstatically leaping, yellow-clad soldiers—flowing into the body’s stomach.
The ad parodies the visual style of battle sequences in such films Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, with sweeping, larger-than-life panoramas of rugged mountain terrain, and also the grandiose commercials pioneered by the likes of Qantas and British Airways.