Getting lost in a work of art is a wonderful moment. And it was this experience that General Assembly Production Centre was attempting to bring to life in the ‘Your Art, Your Gallery’ campaign for the National Gallery of Canada.

The campaign promoted the gallery’s regularly exhibited artwork by way of showing people gazing upon works of art and cutting to appropriate stock shots to symbolize the viewer getting lost within them.

In this case, ‘the agency come to us with a script of what they wanted to do and we fleshed out the idea,’ says Andy Del Castillo, director of business development for Ottawa-based gapc. ‘We decided the best way to go was to break it up so we could revert to the painting. There’s always that visual reference to the painting.

‘We had four stock footage shots for [each of the] four spots. It all depended on what the artwork was. The concept of the spots was that the painting would evoke in the viewer the live pictures.’

And like many others, Del Castillo says he had it in mind to look for stock for one reason: ‘budget.’ Not to mention the fact that taking a crew to Venice for the benefit of four shots would have been a little excessive.

One spot begins with a person looking at a painting by [artist] Belotto of a Venetian building ‘and then it flashes to a shot of Venice to get the ambiance. There are four flashes in 30 seconds. [The shots include] one of a canal, one of a building, one of a plaza with pigeons flying in the air. We looked at a whole bunch of footage and picked the best ones. It was very much to give a sense of Venice, to make it look like a Venetian environment,’says Del Castillo.

A painting by Jackson Pollock was handled in a similar way, but this time the goal was to capture the ambiance of New York City in the 1950s.

‘There were four flashes, all with the same concept. A couple is looking at this work and it flashes to New York circa 1950, with old cars, the Empire State Building and that kind of thing,’ explains Del Castillo.

What does the producer sacrifice when opting for stock?

‘Control of the shot. It makes more sense to shoot it because you’re far more in control of what you’re doing – maybe the footage you need to elicit is so specific you won’t find it out there. If you need people on camera you can’t fake that. The first concern is does it exist: the second is compatibility, and if you’re combining real footage with stock there [might be] a compatibility problem with the look, the quality of the video,’ says Del Castillo.

‘You don’t have control of the exact shot, but if you can get something that works, the price difference is huge.’ *

-www.gapc.com