Bringing back the blue

Sue Ferguson, MD of Ireland/Davenport elaborates on the focus of the new HTH advertising, which builds upon the well-established brand: "We wanted to create an emotional response to the HTH brand I believe we have achieved this in a manner that is non-traditional for the category and intriguing for the viewer."

Oddly depleted

Conceptualised by Philip Ireland and John Davenport and filmed in Cape Town by Jeremy Holden of Threshold Collective, "Blue Migration" opens on a wide shot of a beautiful sky which is oddly depleted of its normal blue colour. Accompanied by a beautiful, ethereal soundtrack, we are taken through a number of scenes where the blue colour appears to be physically draining out of the objects concerned - it seems to physically move out of a man's T-shirt, leaves a small car that is stopped at a traffic light and drains out of a blue swim suit displayed on a mannequin in a shop window.

These patches of blue gradually make their way in a surreal form across the urban landscape, joining other moving blue patches until ultimately one realises where all the blue is going - a regular-looking guy standing in front of his swimming pool and twisting open and dropping a HTH 4-in-1 Floater into his magnificent blue pool.

Contrast

Explains Ireland/Davenport creative director Philip Ireland explains, "The basic creative concept was to demonstrate, in the most visual way possible, how all the blue in the world appears to migrate to your pool when using the HTH 4-in-1 Floater and how everything else that should be blue looks a little less impressive by contrast."

Comments director Jeremy Holden from Threshold Collective on the technical process behind the creative, "The HTH project was a very exciting challenge in that we were utilising a visual treatment that is completely new and thus required much faith and trust from both agency and client. It was fundamental to ensure that we not only tackled the treatment successfully, but also told the story, retained the tone that we desired and presented the product in the best way we could."

Holden enthuses, "It was a great process working with the colour - the beauty of colour, and what our world would be like without a specific colour."

Intensive

The concept behind the commercial required three intensive weeks of post-production under the experienced hand of Graeme Carr from Bite in order to ensure that the actual movement of the "colour blue" from the various objects in the ad, took on a life-like and credible form of the "colour blue" and not just the appearance of paint or water.

Comments Carr, "It was important for us to give the travelling blue substance in the ad a sense of intelligence and personality in its movement. The result is an otherworldly substance that does things that liquid cannot, like floating up a flight of stairs for instance."

He adds, "In addition to the challenge of giving the "colour blue" movement and life, we were also faced with the difficulty of ensuring that this somewhat unearthly blue substance would still be something the viewer could recognise and find convincing."