Brand New School announced the debut of their latest project work, consisting of online commercials and an interactive installation for premium faucet brand Brizo featuring their new SmartTouch faucet. Produced under the creative direction of advertising agency Young & Laramore (Y&L) as part of its Brizo "License to Dream" campaign, contributions from BNS include a :30 PreRoll entitled "License to Dream," as well as a thematically-related interactive touch installation at McCormick Place in Chicago for Brizo's exhibit at the recent Kitchen & Bath Industry Show.
"Fashion and dreams have always been important parts of the Brizo brand, which is well known as 'the faucet brand for the fashion-forward,'" explained Carolyn Hadlock, creative director for Y&L. "Our new campaign embraces the origins of fashion by depicting it in its illustration form, when it's still just a dream in the mind of the designer. For our objectives to deliver a campaign on both digital and interactive platforms, the artists at BNS wound up being an amazing fit."
Featuring the music track "Little Bird" from Goldfrapp, the campaign's commercial recently debuted on culinary and cultural sites Bravo and Epicurious, and in other digital media channels. "We were challenged to illustrate Brizo's patent SmartTouch Technology," said BNS art director Mario Sader, "which allows people to touch anywhere on the faucet's body or handle to turn water on or off -- while also connecting to their concept of illustrating dreams. Beginning with the idea of using elements of a dish our talent was preparing for her dinner guests, we added illustrations of birds, flowers and a mermaid, and recombined the pieces to form our narrative. The virtual kitchen environment was created in post, to give us more control over the camera movements and the timing. For finishing, we composited footage of watercolor over the elements to create the transitions and washes that give the illustrations extra realism."
Justin Bakse, director of interactivity for Brand New School, produced the interactive installation. "For the exhibit, we wanted to extend the action of the commercial content into the real world. So, just as the touch of a hand turns the faucet on in the spot, and an animation of watercolor images flows onto the walls nearby, we used the same assets -- animated over an LED video wall -- where the animation is triggered by a touch on the faucet."
The BNS toolset for the commercial consisted of pencils and paint, finished in Adobe After Effects. Bakse and the BNS interactive team built their installation using an Arduino interface and custom circuitry for sensing the faucet's activation. The proprietary software was developed in C++ using OpenFrameworks.
"At this moment, very few companies can match our depth as a creative production company capable of delivering unmatched creative content of any scale across all platforms," said Jonathan Notaro, founder and creative director for BNS.