Mellow Yellow

In the new AGT Directory ‘Think Yellow’ campaign, Vancouver-based production company The Ace Film Company takes us back to those early library years – where, between mastering the Dewey Decimal System and reading Superfudge we picked up our first maxim – and puts forth the notion that although we should never judge a book by its cover, we can judge a book by its color.

The bbdo, Calgary team of creative director Gordon Smith and art director Brent Wickes cleverly play on our predisposition for preconceptions.

The Mark Walton-directed spots follow a similar narrative structure, beginning first as live-action segments in which the viewer sees an event or action believed to be true. As each spot progresses, the viewer is privy to the rest of the picture, realizing the opening scene is only part of a whole, a fraction of the truth. This ‘true’ scene turns into a still which, in turn, becomes a line art drawing and ends up as an advertisement in the agt directory.

In one spot (the others feature a toy train, apartment building and ski hill), a 17th century courtesan scene (think Amadeus) turns into a present-day costume party which is transformed into a Yellow Pages ad for the Costume Warehouse. The spot is accompanied by the tag line: ‘You can be anyone you can think of – when you `Think Yellow’.’

In Ace’s Media 100 non-linear edit suite, editor Reg Harkema transformed the live-action shots to still frames by exporting the end frames onto discs. From here, the frames were taken back to bbdo and artists created the ads and the Yellow Pages for the end sequences.

Shot over four days by cinematographer John Houtman, the four 15s – packaged as two 30s – will begin airing sometime in mid-February.

At bbdo, Mark Forrester produced. Production house credits go to executive producer Parker Jefferson and producer Keith Hines. Post was done at Gastown Post and Transfer and audio post at KOKO Productions. JL