Director Matt Hodgson Pairs Lagoon Amusement Park With Bitter:Sweet for 2010 Ad Campaign

Part 4: The Music

A key component to moving forward with the edit phase of Lagoon’s 2010 Campaign was finding the right music. “I had a cool music idea in my head as we were shooting, but no actual track, said Matt Hodgson (director/writer). “So once we had some hero still sequences to play with I spent a lot of time trying to match the idea in my head with an actual piece of music. After weeks of playing different music tracks against the rough cut I discovered the unforgettable sound of Bitter:Sweet, their amazing tune titled, “THE BOMB,” and the rest is history.”

Formerly the title song for NBC’s “Lipstick Jungle,” “THE BOMB” appears on Bitter:Sweet’s newest album release titled “Drama.”  Bitter:Sweet features the talents of Kiran Shahani (Composer/Producer, and member of the group known as Supreme Beings of Leisure ) and Shana Halligan (singer/songwriter, whose father is Dick Halligan of the 70s rock group Blood Sweat & Tears). “When I first heard “THE BOMB” I absolutely loved it,” Hodgson said. “The tune featured this very cool, eclectic mix of instruments that you don’t normally hear together, and then on top of it all was Shana Halligan’s mind-blowing voice.”

While the instrumentals were a perfect fit with Hodgson’s vision, the lyrics needed to be tweaked to more closely reflect the Lagoon experience and their message. “I honestly thought there was no way Bitter:Sweet would tweak their lyrics, so initially I was just trying to acquire the rights to the song’s instrumentals,” Hodgson said. “But the more I listened to Shana the more I knew we needed her voice on this campaign.”

Days later Sanne Hagelsten of Zync Music in New York had a call set up for Hodgson and Halligan to discuss the new lyrics. “Shana was so great about wanting to make this work and so willing to rewrite lyrics that would take this campaign to a whole new level,” Hodgson said. “The funny thing was, most of the original lyrics already fit Lagoon’s message, so it was a fairly simple rewrite, and Shana nailed it, both in terms of the new lyrics and the resing. Shana was so cool  to work with—the consummate professional, and she and everyone at Zync Music, Canshaker Productions and North Star Media went above and beyond to make this work for us.”

The Lagoon version of “THE BOMB” will begin hitting airwaves April 26, 2010 when Lagoon launches its 2010 advertising campaign.

Bitter:Sweet’s music has also been featured on “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Sex and the City,” “Desperate Housewives,” “The Devil Wears Prada” and  “Duplicity” starring Julia Roberts and Clive Owen. Bitter:Sweet’s music is available on iTunes.

(Matt’s relationship and understanding with music, being a musician and composer himself, has worked as an advantage over the years in crafting creative campaigns that have been put together with strong music elements from artists, like Kenny Loggins, Take 6, Rockapella, The House Jacks, and Sonnet).

PAINTING WITH LIGHT & IMAGINATION

Part 3: Different Approach, Different Tools

Because of the promotional nature of Lagoon’s 2010 advertising campaign, capturing iconic imagery wasn’t enough. Hodgson wanted the promotional offers to have the same stop motion energy as the imagery that surrounded them.

“I have always been fascinated with the  concept of Light Painting and I really felt like this was the perfect opportunity to use it,” Hodgson said.  “We had gone to such lengths to capture stop motion image sequences that had a fun, frenetic energy, and I wanted the offers to feel just as fun and organic.”

Hodgson, Williams and Gardner spent a number of evenings on the park testing various light sources until they discovered the right combination of light sources and color.

“We really did a lot of experimenting with different set-ups, sizes and powers of flashlights, and LEDs as well as different gel colors and opacities until we achieved the line thickness and texture we wanted,” Hodgson said. “We also quickly realized that this couldn’t look like a bunch of guys out waving flashlights in the dark. We knew we needed real artists who could draw and redraw imagery in the same space in the air with precision and accuracy.”

Enter Cameron Gardner with a troop of amazing illustrators who performed the daunting feat of writing words and drawing images backwards in the air, for long periods of time, on freezing cold evenings in October, November, and then again in March.

“Directing this team of artists that Cameron had assembled was such a cool experience,” Hodgson said. “It was freezing cold, it was late at night, Matthew Williams was jamming to figure out lighting balances and proper exposures, I was directing Cameron and his amazing troop of artists as they painted imaginary lines and images in the air, and then we would all run to the camera to see the end result. It was a total creative experience that brought artists from a variety of different disciplines together to make these titles that were absolutely the perfect compliment to the stills sequences we had shot.”

When all was said and done, we netted 96 set-ups and generated over 11,000 DSLR stills. “We were super happy with the imagery that we had captured, but at the same time we were overcome by the mountain of images we needed to dig through to find our hero still sequences,” Hodgson said.

FRESH THINKING LEADS TO POWERFUL IMAGERY IN 2010 LAGOON CAMPAIGN

Part 2: Fresh Thinking

When Matt Hodgson (director/writer) and Matthew Williams (director of photography) started prepping for Lagoon’s 2010 campaign shoot they were all about taking a different approach to capturing imagery that conveyed the fun of Lagoon.

“We were really going for this fun spontaneous energy that was child-like and organic,” Hodgson said. “Shooting stills and then animating them gave us the fun energy we were hoping for.”

Crafting a campaign from animated still sequences was a dramatically different approach to the way Hodgson and Williams have worked with Lagoon over the past few years.

“Our recent campaigns have been so steeped in visual effects that it was really challenging to approach a concept where the all the visual effects were happening in-camera, Hodgson said. “The whole idea of shooting the campaign stop motion was really an exhilarating creative experience that allowed us to just play with ideas and then watch them materialize on the laptop behind us. There’s something really cool and totally freeing about that.”

“We knew that this campaign had to be created from actual stills,” Williams said. “Just pulling frames out of video or film sequences doesn’t have the same organic feeling to it. This needed have that classic stop motion energy, so shooting stills was really the only solution.”

Williams shot the campaign using the Full Frame DSLR Canon 1Ds MKII and the High Speed DSLR CANON 1D MKII for the still portion of the shoot, and an Arri 435 for the 35mm high-speed film portion.

“One of the things I loved about this campaign was that while seemingly everyone in the production world was rushing to shoot video on an DSLR we turned to DSLRs to shoot stills,” Hodgson said. “It was really a cool opportunity for Matt Williams to show off his range and expertise. Matt started off as a still guy, so he totally understands composition in that world, but he has also shot every film format from 16mm to 35mm to IMAX, so when it came to marrying our frenetic still sequences with the high-speed 35mm footage Matt was totally in his element.”

Hodgson & Williams shot with a scaled down crew for most of the shoot days adding crew for larger 35mm hero moments. “Because we were shooting stills we could move a lot faster, which allowed us to do a lot more setups in the time we had,” Williams said.

Besides capturing iconic stop motion sequences of Lagoon during the day the duo spent a lot of time shooting the park at night.  “There is a totally different energy at Lagoon at night, so we spent a lot of time capturing imagery that was absolutely stunning,” Hodgson said.

“IT’S WHAT FUN IS!”

Part 1: The New Direction

Lagoon Amusement Park launched its 2010 Advertising Campaign this week, and it signals the culmination of months of creative work that began back in August 2009 when Matt Hodgson (director/writer/creative director) was presenting Lagoon’s Marketing team with campaign directions that would never see the light of day.

After creating what was arguably one of the most memorable television campaigns in Utah advertising history for Lagoon Amusement Park in 2009, Hodgson, along co-collaborators Matthew Williams (director of photography) and Cameron Gardner (art director) set out to up the ante with yet another unforgettable campaign in 2010.

“There was this real pressure born out of the success of the 2009 campaign,” Hodgson said. “Everyone would tell me how much they loved the dreamy slow motion imagery, the wispy graphics  and Sonnet’s amazing song, and wondered if we were going to do the same thing again? It was crazy! But I was confident that my new creative directions were just as powerful and I was eager to get them in front of Lagoon’s Marketing team.”

Lagoon’s Marketing team caught Hodgson’s new vision instantly and asked him to determine more precise production budgets and schedules. But upon his return, worries about the economy had forced Lagoon to reduce their production budget to a level that made achieving Hodgson’s creative vision impossible.

“It was a devastating moment,” Hodgson recalls. “We were all so high on the new creative, everyone at Coca-Cola was excited and had already approved the concepts, our visual effects partners in LA were ready to go, and we had to shut everything down and start over. Not the best news considering we only had three to four weeks, to craft new creative and then shoot everything before the weather changed.”

A NEW VIBE, A FRESH VISION, TOTALLY ON BRAND FOR LAGOON & COCA-COLA

Undaunted by the need to start over Matt Hodgson (director/writer/creative director) went back to work, this time with new budget parameters and a request from Lagoon to infuse more fast paced energy into the new campaign ideas.

“Sometimes starting over can be a good thing,” Hodgson said. The marketing team at Lagoon—Terry Capener, Dick Andrew and Lance Eastman, along with park owners Dave & Kristin Freed, are so great to work with and they’re so supportive that there was just a real confidence that I would come back with more cool ideas that would be right for 2010,” Hodgson said. “But everyone was quick to remind me that even though we were working with less money, the campaign still needed to be just as cool and memorable as the previous year’s campaign. A tall order to be sure, but it was a challenge we couldn’t wait to tackle.”

Hodgson’s solution? An ultra hip stop motion campaign shot almost entirely with DSLRs, with exclamation point moments shot on high-speed 35mm film.

“The whole idea of crafting a campaign using iconic stop motion photography was not just about creating a fresh new look and energy,” Hodgson said.  As a storyteller it allowed me to expand my canvas to tell much longer stories in a very compressed way.”

Hodgson loved the idea of telling the Lagoon story from the perspectives of different Lagoon attendees as they arrived at the park in the morning  to the time the park closed late at night. “There’s a very cool value proposition there,” Hodgson said. “Through stop motion we were able to take all of these different days full of fun and compress them into :30 second high-energy, bite-sized chunks.”

Being able to tell the Lagoon story from a variety of different viewpoints would ultimately result in a number of different spots that could be sprinkled throughout Lagoon’s media buy to give viewers a different taste of the Lagoon experience every time they turned on their televisions.

“The more I thought about this direction the more I became convinced that it was the right thing to do, and that’s when I called Matthew Williams and Cameron Gardner to get their feedback. The genuine excitement I felt from both of them about this largely experimental idea was exactly what I was hoping for. When insanely talented guys like Matthew Williams and Cameron Gardner see the potential of an idea and are willing to throw everything they’ve got behind it, you know it’s a winner. Fortunately everyone at Lagoon and Coca-Cola felt the same way.”

This new creative direction would take Lagoon’s 2010 advertising campaign far from the dreamy romantic vibe of the previous year to fast-paced storytelling that was destined to capture the frenzied fun of Lagoon in a completely novel way.

STUNNING LAGOON CAMPAIGN & ADDY WIN LANDS DUO ADNEWS COVER & FEATURE

On the eve of their much anticipated follow-up campaign to Lagoon Amusement Park’s hugely successful 2009 “LUSH” campaign, Matt Hodgson (director/writer) and Matthew Williams (director of photography) are being featured in the Adnews April 2010 Production issue for their work on the new 2010 Lagoon campaign, while imagery from their new campaign has been selected to appear on the magazine’s cover.

The Adnews April 2010 Production issue is scheduled to hit newsstands late April and will also be available at www.adnewsonline.com .