The day spent shooting in a school hall with a (literally) colourful lead, however, proved to be a largely light-hearted affair. 

Flubbed lines, background noise disruptions and make-up malfunctions are all fairly typical hurdles in a day’s work. More unexpectedly, it’s that one little can of compressed air that proved to be quite the disobedient prima donna! As this blooper reel shows, everyone took them in their stride – and with big smiles all around.

Click play below to
VIEW THE BLOOPER REEL:

Click on the link below to
VIEW THE FINAL AD:

MARSHALLS 30 sec Brand TV Ad

Working with photographer Kim Thunder, BMG Marketing Manager Veronique Bezuidenhout and many other enthusiastic BMG employees, we spent 1 full day outlining the BMG logo on a warehouse floor, and 2 days unpacking and arranging over R1 million in engineering components inside the logo – all before we even got to the photo shoot.

The shoot itself involved an extended stint 6 metres off the ground in a cherry picker – all in an attempt to visually capture the massive diversity of BMG’s product offerings.

The end result of this large undertaking? Something special, with some real staff involvement, as each BMG division sent in samples of their signature products to make up the logo.

In addition to our stills photography we captured the project on video as well, to be featured  as a logo animation edit on BMG Vision, BMG’s internal TV channel. We’ll be posting that on this site in the near future too.

Click the thumbnails below to
VIEW BEHIND THE SCENES PHOTOS FROM THE SHOOT

Day one of filming started with daybreak city shots which were captured while hanging out the side of a helicopter flying down Smith Street – looking for that perfect ‘eye in the sky’ scene. This was followed by more dangling from the chopper while filming trucks on the open freeways and caneland roads of the KZN North Coast. You could hear our Director of Photography muttering to himself, “WTF am I doing hanging out of a perfectly good helicopter this far off the ground?”

Days two and three followed with more dangling from fast-moving vehicles… except this time it was filming off of a purpose-built chair attached to the back end of a SUV. Shooting often involved hurtling down the road at arm’s length from a sixteen wheeler. Fun fun fun! Well, maybe not so much fun for the guys attached to the chair barely a foot above the gravel and tar.

The final day of shooting was set aside for green screen time, followed by days of CGI fun for the techno geeks. What you have to love about these creatives is the more you push their parameters the more excited they get. They love this part of the game. 

In the end a fast-paced shoot produced a stylish, adrenaline-filled commercial that came together beautifully.

Click the thumbnails below to
VIEW BEHIND THE SCENES PHOTOS FROM THE SHOOT:

WATCH THE TV COMMERCIAL

By far the greatest challenge when making our 30 second TV commercial for Echinaforce (the natural cold and flu remedy) was realistically simulating a grey day downpour on a location shoot in what turned out to be a sunny, blue-skied day in
Durban.

After weeks of building and testing proprietary rainmakers, the long day of location filming produced a number of issues that called for some creative on-the-spot problem solving. Largely because of the weather.

Early morning Umhlanga winds (that ended up persisting throughout the day) meant a hasty last minute disassembly and repositioning of the rainmaker as we tried to take advantage of first light at sunrise. Throughout the day, the gloomy urban set we were after, had to be shaded from the beautiful bright sunshine. Often it fell to the Public Address team to weigh down the giant portable shades.

Murphy’s Law delivered comfortably calm, grey and overcast conditions the very next day, but nonetheless,  the end result of our efforts proved all the scrambling and sitting around was worth it.

Click the thumbnails below to
VIEW BEHIND THE SCENES PHOTOS FROM THE SHOOT:

WATCH THE TV COMMERCIAL

Four location shoots, four different days of filming and over 30 cast members meant we had to continually box clever. Particularly when it came to finding our performers. We ended up recruiting professionals, first timers, friends and family alike. And if you look closely, you may even spot some familiar agency faces in front of the camera.

It’s fitting that the ad was for Bio-Strath, the body and mind-replenishing natural supplement because we had to be at the top of our game, mentally and physically throughout the production process.

WATCH THE TV COMMERCIAL

Click the thumbnails below for a behind the scenes look at
SHOOT LOCATION #1:

Click the thumbnails below for a behind the scenes look at
SHOOT LOCATION #2:

Click the thumbnails below for a behind the scenes look at 
SHOOT LOCATION #3:

Click the thumbnails below for a behind the scenes look at
SHOOT LOCATION #4:

Public Address has now been tasked to translate our i-truck concept into a TVC and focus the media plan to reach as wide a base of viewers as possible
(that fit in to the i-truck target profile), in as short a time as possible…

Well we’re doing just that and are really excited about this project. We can really geek out here and get to make some really cool stuff in post.

We’ll be done in a month (quick as that!) and flighting the month after.

You’ll be able to see it right here before that, or at least a sneak peak behind the scenes. You’ll want to buy a whole fleet of trucks, just to insure with them.

This is an exciting prospect indeed for Public Address, considering that just a couple of months ago we were approached to create corporate stationery and an information pack for them!

We’ve learned a lot of hard lessons in the process and done a helluvalot of growing up! (We have yet to wean ourselves off phrases like ‘helluvalot’ though…)

So we figured it was time for an evolution of our own brand, and we’ve used this website make-over as the catalyst for the process. Our new logo retains the sensibility of the past, but presents us with a cleaner, more contemporary aesthetic…

LOGOTYPE:

We’ve opted for Helvetica Neue Typeface, a timeless classic that’s proven itself to be a designer’s best friend time and again!

OUR 3 SYMBOLS:

We’d already used the colon ( : ) in our logotype previously, and it’s still a device that’s well suited to our business, unlike its more seedy anatomical namesake(!). It’s the punctuation mark that pre-empts the delivery of a text statement. Our previous secondary style often combined it with 2 other symbols as a set of 3, so this time round we’ve incorporated the entire set into our primary identity.

They represent the fundamental aspects of our offering:

Targeted Marketing:

• Achieving Strategic Objectives
• Recognising Consumer Insights
• Tailoring Messages to Audiences

Loud & Clear Messaging:

• Eye Catching
• Skillfully Articulated
• Easily Understandable
• Eloquent & Evocative

 Impactful Delivery:

• Proficiently Produced
• Action Inducing
• Timeously Delivered

SPEECH-BLOCK HOLDING SHAPE:

This is a new device, which houses the logo symbols and logotype and presents them as a statement. It’s influenced by the panels we see on sites like Facebook and YouTube, used to link blocks of text to people and/or functionality. It also eases the application of the logo onto any and every background colour or texture we may choose to throw behind it.

COLOUR:

We’ve retained our colour palette of red, grey, black and white, but the logo itself has now simplified to a monotone red (always more ‘blood’ than ‘post-box’), while the others are now used in the secondary style.

OUR NEW DESCRIPTOR: ‘Creative Brand Campaigning’

We feel we’ve been around long enough now to coin our own phrase…
It’s our new way of summaring our services, which you can read more about here.

We’ve always liked the justification for our choice of name… a Public Address is a system used to address crowds of people, or an important message delivered to the public (the kind that ‘we interrupt this broadcast to bring to you…’). At launch there was, however, a real danger of people phoning us for audio equipment (they actually have once or twice), so we opted for a very literal descriptor at launch: ‘Advertising and Design’.