BigSmokeStudio Blog

Happy St.Patrick’s Day from BigSmokeStudio

          Arthur Guinness started brewing ales from 1759 in Leixlip, then at the St. James’s Gate Brewery, Dublin. On 31 December he signed (up to) a 9,000 year lease at £45 per annum for the unused brewery. Ten years later on 19 May 1769 Guinness exported his ale for the first time, when six and a half barrels were shipped to England.

          Surfer is a critically acclaimed integrated advertising campaign launched in 1999 by Diageo to promote Guinness-brand draught stout in the United Kingdom. The cornerstone of the campaign is a television commercial, originally 60 seconds long, which centred around a Polynesian surfer successfully taking on a gigantic wave. Shot in Hawaii over a nine-day period and directed by Jonathan Glazer, the piece went on to win more awards than any other commercial in 1999 (Clio Awards, D&AD Awards, Cannes Lions), and in 2002 was voted the “Best ad of all time” in a poll conducted by Channel 4 and The Sunday Times.

          The plot centers around a group of surfers, waiting for the perfect wave. As it arrives, the crashing ‘white horses’ turn into actual horses. One by one, a surfer ‘crashes out’, leaving only one, who manages to conquer the wave. The others join him as they celebrate on the shore.

Jonathan Glazer directed the video, the man behind one of the best video clips in history - “Virtual Insanity” by Jamiroquai (1996) and Rabbit in your headlight by UNKLE.

Directors of Photography: Ivan Bird, Don King (water), Lee Allison (aerial)
Production company is Framestone.

How It Was Done

“Originally, the whole sequence was to be computer generated, or at least, either the waves or the horses to be computer generated.

In any case, it was eventually decided that as little computer generated effects as possible would be used.

The Waves

These were filmed in Hawaii, at a place called Waimei Bay. It was there where the crew had their first stroke of luck – whilst looking for a nice angle to shoot from, they met their surfer, called enigmatically, ‘Rocky’. He, and three of his surfer friends were to be in the advert.

For the waves, the crew were doubly lucky. The massive waves only happen a few days each year, and so with camera equipment rigged to jetskis, helicopters and the longboards themselves, the waves were filmed.

The Horses

Back in the studio, there was the question of the white horses. The Lipizzaner Stallions6 from the Spanish Riding School of Vienna were recruited for such a task.

The horses were trained in the moves required for the sequences, and had to match frame-by-frame to the previously recorded footage in Hawaii. These moves involved jumping over short gates in a water bath. The studio was completely blue, so that in a move similar to that used on the TV show Knightmare, the blue would be de-selected, and the horse placed in the appropriate area.

This in itself, took about 3 days to film.

The Visuals

So then, the computer voodoo magic then was employed. The surfer and his group were placed in the overhead wave shot, so that they appeared to be paddling toward it. The horses were then duplicated, the blue de-selected, and placed in the wave shot where the crest rises menacingly over the surfers. At this stage, the whole sequence was still in colour.

The confusion of hooves, mane and spray were in part live footage and computer generated images.

When the visuals were then done, the whole sequence was converted to black and white.” *

* Taken from BBC.

And I tell you what: tick followed tock followed tick followed tock followed tick…