Hands-On for Greenpeace
April 17, 2009
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By Conor Risch
http://www.pdnonline.com/pdn/content_display/photoserve/surveillance/e3if26a27fe344b20e46bc56c15f371791a
Early this year Greenpeace enlisted Romanian agency Scala JWT for a campaign to raise awareness of the environmental dangers inherent in nuclear energy production. More specifically the campaign targeted mothers who live and raise children near the Cernavoda Nuclear Power Plant, which houses two nuclear reactors.
Because of the small budget for the campaign, the creatives and executives at Scala JWT took a DIY approach to creating the ads, producing them entirely in-house, which allowed them to do the work they would normally farm out to freelancers. Art director Virgiliu Andone says that this role reversal helped refresh the artistic sensibility of the creatives, and also turned out to be quite fun.
Andone says he and his team decided against a “doomsday scenario,” a common trope in green advertising, because more often than not it looks like a futuristic video game setting rather than a frightening future reality. “We went on a different path,” he says. “Coziness would have to come through in the layout, the semblance of absolute calm and joy, so we could capture the attention of our target audience.” The team decided to create familiar domestic scenes featuring cute stuffed animals. Eventually the viewer would realize the cute children’s toys that drew them in were gruesomely mutated, delivering the “Say no to nuclear energy” message in a subtle but powerful way.
After Andone and Aaron Balazs, another Scala art director, selected the toys they thought would look the best, began the process of hacking and sewing the stuffed rabbits and elephants to modify them. “We were left with a massive bag full of traumatized toys,” says Andone.
The first shoots took place in Andone’s apartment. “I was really happy with the results,” he remembers. “Then I downloaded the pictures and they turned out to be crap.” Andone and Balazs, who studied photography in college, then did another set-up in their ski resort lodgings while away for the weekend on a snowboarding trip. Again they were enthusiastic during the shoot, and again they were disappointed once they got a closer look at the images. Finally another art director got involved. Andrei Orcula kicked Scala’s managing director out of his office for several hours and made and elephant photograph. Then Andone made another set-up in his apartment and managed a shot of the rabbit toy that everyone was happy with.
Still, the images weren’t quite there, Andone says, so there was post-production work to be done. “The model elephant did not have two noses. Instead it sported six legs and for ears. So the postproduction work was a reflection of my capacity to visualize in advance what would make a good ad. I had to remove the extra legs and ears and add an extra Photoshopped nose. For the bunny the only chop job consisted of replacing one of the ears, and repositioning the foreground just a bit.”
“The biggest challenge was to be as strict as we could be about the standard of the work,” says Andone. “It’s easy to be critical when you expect [someone else to deliver] the work; much harder when you have to produce it yourself.” Andone adds, “It is perhaps much more honest to go about your business the way we did, at least from time to time. Designers or painters or indeed some engineers don’t expect somebody else to put their work into practice…. In advertising it is easy to find yourself delegating everything you do, and this can rust your artistic sensibility.”
The ads have appeared in magazines throughout Romania, and Greenpeace has distributed posters, stickers and desktop wallpaper of the ads through their network.
the team:
Mihai Cojocaru - Creative Director
Virgiliu Andone - Art Director
Andreea Dragomir - Copywriter
Angela Teodorescu - super CS
Aaron Balasz, Andrei Orcula - fotografi
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