Actor John Flaus strums a tune on the sitar in James Boags Draught "Pure Waters".

Of all the imagery associated with beer advertising, none seems more contrary to the idea of convincing drinkers to crack open a cold one than to evoke the idea of clean, fresh water. Surely people don’t need to be reminded that beer is made from the stuff, when they can be readily sold the idea of beer as a symbol of perpetual cottage parties and bikini-clad babes.

But it’s exactly that style of “laddy” creative, as Publicis Mojo, Sydney art director Steve Wakelam calls it, that the agency wanted to avoid when creating the folkloric tale “Pure Waters” for Australian beer James Boags Draught.

The spot features a weathered and wise narrator – played by noted Australian character actor John Flaus – telling the story of the strangely transformative powers of the beer’s Tasmanian water. While extolling the virtue of this water that “just makes things better”, the narrator’s guitar makes its own transformation into a sitar, while other changes occur: a bicycle into a motorbike, a canoe into a speed boat, a paring knife into a lightsaber and, of course, a box of empty glass bottles into James Boags Draught.

The creative team’s primary objective was to mix classic advertising with subtle storytelling.

“We wanted to root this in a fact about the beer rather than trying to create funny, feel-good advertising, which tends to be where the market goes,” says Wakelam. “We had this fact that it’s made with great water and the phrase, ‘It makes it better’. From there, it’s a little leap to go, ‘Well if it makes it better, how can you dramatize that?’ We thought it’d be funny if you could physically dramatize it by showing things that go into the water and come out better.”

To achieve the desired level of subtly the agency chose Revolver Films, Sydney director Steve Rogers, who was instrumental in pulling back any ideas that bordered too much on slapstick comedy.

“I think it would be very easy to give it to a comedy director who would make sure that he’d wrung the humor out of every possible situation,” says Wakelam. “We knew we’d get the humor with Steve but that he’d ensure that it was a secondary thing – something the viewer would pick up themselves by watching the spot. Mainly we wanted underplayed humor that just kind of happens.”

So instead of having an SUV back into the water and emerge as a Ferrari, says Wakelam, less obvious imagery was employed. The motorbike, for instance, was an old Indian brand motorbike. There’s also a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot of a duck transforming into a swan in the second scene. Focusing on subtle flourishes allowed some of the more bizarre transformations, like the Star Wars lightsaber, to stand out without having to hit the viewer over the head.

“I don’t think anyone imagined that we’d actually be able to do it,” says Wakelam of getting approval to use the lightsaber. “It was a joke we all thought would be quite funny so we wrote it in the script. Bizarrely, the legal department came back and said, ‘It’s fine as long as you don’t use the sound effect’, the famous whooshing sound.”

The four-day shoot took place in remote locations around Tasmania, including the small township of Franklin in the south east. Rogers describes the experience as something akin to “a really bad summer camp”.

“We were in the sticks,” says producer Michael Ritchie. “The crew stayed in backpacker accommodation and tents.”

Roughing it was the order of the day with the weather doing its part by unleashing a cyclone during the shoot.

“The wind was gale force and blowing roofs off of buildings,” says Rogers. “Otherwise, technically the things that look the most impressive from an end result point of view, like the bike turning into a motorbike, were the easiest to shoot. There was nothing really difficult other than the weather and the remoteness of the locations, which meant that everything had to be walked in or driven off-road.”

Shooting was basically a “match frame exercise”, the director says, where he basically matched the lenses and the angle of the camera. His guiding framework was if the lines matched up roughly on the shoot day, it’d line up better when it came time to make the transformations in post, which was an additional five days.

Indeed, the most costly aspect of the shoot turned out to be the amount of props ruined by dunking them in water.

“The production designer, Steven Jones-Evans, had people running around Tasmania, Melbourne and Victoria trying to find stuff that would be the after-dunk stuff and the pre-dunk stuff,” says Ritchie.

Most of the props were destroyed when they fell in the river or got knocked over by the wind. In the case of the canoe, it simply sunk. There was one item, however, that made it back safe and sound.

“I think the bear made it back intact,” says Ritchie of the enormous prop teddy bear that is shown strapped to the roof of a car. “We didn’t really want to pay for a $2,000 teddy bear.”

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Publicis Mojo
Revolver Films