Kathi Prosser has seen a lot of Warholesque pop art in her day. When The Partners’ Film Company director saw the board for Unilever’s Sunlight laundry ‘tabs,’ she saw the possibility to mix art and marketing in a similar way to the legendary artist.

‘I felt that the box of detergent was very pop art,’ says Prosser. ‘And the detergent packages for Tide and Sunlight have been ripped off on t-shirts for skateboarders – they’re some of the best graphics around. I really liked that and I wanted to push that aspect of it. So the whole thing is propped in very, very saturated and bright plastic. Everything is plastic. The washbin is plastic; it’s a plastic bucket and plastic gloves. You know, plastic mops.’

The spot’s creative meshed nicely with the young director’s vision. ‘The camera finds these jiggling tabs on top of a washing machine. It focuses on them for a moment and moves to the washing dial. The dial moves from wash to rinse, and in so doing, instead of just regular water coming out of the hose, this tumultuous earthquake of very thick mud comes out of the hose. It’s not meant to be realistic, but what they’re trying to claim is that [Sunlight tabs] work harder than other brands.’

Prosser took great care in planning the shoot, her second job as a commercial director (her first was a spot for the Sears clothing line Nevada). Well ahead of time, she was already organizing the production and meeting with the other artists who would lend their expertise.

‘We got the Henry Artist, the editor, the dop and myself all together in a room before we shot. I wanted to get this right,’ she says. ‘So I, in fact, videoed the whole thing on a handicam. We cut a bit of it on the weekend before we shot. We tested. We said, ‘Okay, if we’re going to do this shot we have three options. We can shoot a series of so-called stills. We can shoot a series of stills with small dolly moves in them. Or we could shoot one long move that does everything.’

It was the latter option that was employed on the one-day shoot in Toronto last month. ‘We [ended up] choreographing one long, fluid shot. We shot it on an arm so we could get a little bit more of a bird’s-eye and compose each frame in a very, very graphic way. There’s only going to be one cut in the entire spot – the cut to the mud.

‘The move itself is like an animal creeping around and looking. It follows the line of the eye. But it does what the eye can do, which the camera usually cannot completely replicate,’ Prosser says.

This single-cut approach forced the director to come up with innovative post-production techniques to give the spot an original feel.

Speaking to Playback on shoot day, Prosser gives a sense of her goals for the post process.

‘When we get into editing we’re going to take small chunks out. Maybe 30 frames here and there. And we will then morph the end of one to the beginning of another. It sort of takes on this organic meets robotic [feel]. It’s neither smooth and realistic nor totally motion controlled. It’s got these fluid changes,’ the director explains.

‘And we won’t even cut to a product shot at the end,’ she continues. ‘What we’ll do is use the technique to again creep and pulse away from the mud and back onto the product for the final shot. It won’t have the usual cut to product.’

With this demanding and original post style, Prosser had the spot’s editor sit in on set. Not only that, but a full plan b was being executed on the off-chance the ‘long, fluid shot’ and the ‘morphs’ turned out to be unsuccessful.

‘We’ve got a switcher on set so that we can match frames, so that if we need to cut in between, the cuts won’t be visible. We’re using the switcher, obviously, to perfectly line up the end of one take and the beginning of the next.’

The spot, out of Ammirati Puris Lintas, was written by apl’s Mark Biernacki and art directed by Stephanie Owens. Creative directors Stephen Jurisic and Angus Tucker watched over the project for the agency, while Pat White produced. Sally Leggett produced for Partners’. The dop was Sean Valentini. Panic and Bob’s Tanis Darling cut the spot and Sean Cochrane at Crush was the Henry Artist. Physical effects [read: the mud] were completed by Toronto’s Performance Solutions.

For Prosser, ‘it’s all about finding a perspective that people aren’t used to seeing.’ Her fresh perspective hit the airwaves on the East Coast around Christmas and is airing across Canada this month. *

-www.partnersfilm.com