Deanston Whisky TVC

I recently travelled to Capetown, South Africa to direct a TV commercial for a Scottish whisky brand called Deanston. The ad agency, Candor, had a humorous script designed to bring something new to the sea of very similar advertising that the famous whisky brands seem stuck in. With their longterm production partner, Slammer, on top of the production, they just needed a bilingual director to bring it to life. We handled the talent casting, storyboarding, and some creative, and we were all set. After extensive casting, we decided on Mia Sabathy for the lead female. She brought some sophistication and elegance to the role, but was quirky and silly enough to let the humor come through.

For our lead male, the character of Deanston, we decided on Vivian Dawson, an extremely photogenic model and actor who I have known for many years.

The additional casting for the 6 supporting characters, i.e. "Glens" was done in South Africa, and they all did a great job.

We filmed at a popular restaurant/bar in downtown Capetown, and we had a tight schedule for the day. It was intense, but we knocked it out.

We filmed using a Sony Burano, and minimal lighiting, relying a lot on the natural ambience of the restaurant. After our editing process, we visited Muddy Wang at iView in Taipei for some top-notch colorgrading. We were inspiired both by The Great Gatsby, as well as Grand Budapest Hotel.

Here are a few stills from the final commercial:

As the restaurant location was on a busy streetcorner in bustling Capetown, noise was an issue. Our onset audio recordist did his best, but in the end we need to re-record audio in a couple of spots due to traffic noises in the background.

In the end we made a full 50 second version, a 30 second and 15 second for TV, and a 6 second for Youtube. The commercial pokes fun at the conservative advertiisng of competing whisky brands, and stirred up a little controversy, but the overall consumer reaction and random street testing was overwhelmingly positive, and the commercial was heavily pushed on TV throughout the holiday season. Here is the 50 second full version commercial: