Leo Vegas Hits On The Big Red Button

We all like a bit of kooky in our commercials. It’s fair to say that not many thought a gorilla smashing out Phil Collins on the drums would be an iconic Cadburys spokesperson, nor an unstoppable Terry Crews forcing his muscles to literally shout at you for Old Spice would be a hit. That’s because, in the world of ads, strange is splendid.

In their latest spot for online casino Leo Vegas - 'Carcus', Biscuit directing duo Big Red Button certainly embrace the odd. Introducing us to the debonair Leo Vegas (think James Bond but with more bite), the spot sees him in a club, attempting to seduce… er… a pig carcass. Add in a Lynchian dance routine and abrupt ending and you’ve got one of 2016 most intriguing spots.

We were tickled by the spot and Leo’s mane-ly charm, so grabbed the Big Red boys for a chat about how they put it all together.

How did you get involved in the project?

We did some idents for Leo Vegas with the same creative team earlier in the year and we had a lot of fun. They were really collaborative and the client was really up for letting us do something a bit different, so when they came back with new scripts we were eager to get on board.

It’s safe to say that the content isn’t your usual '30-second-spot’ fodder? Did you worry at any point about how you’d interpret the agency’s idea?

Not really, we had a good working relationship with them and we knew they'd come to us because they wanted us to take a bold approach. It always helps when the weirdness is baked into the script. It makes it a lot easier to trust your instincts and to just worry about making the kind of thing you'd want to watch.

What were the early stages of prep? What did you need to nail down early on?

Well, one of the most difficult things about working with puppets is getting the design right up front. There's such a long lead time that you have to make sure you get the look of it and the functionality nailed down really early on. We spent a lot of time going back and forth with John Nolan, the puppet designer, about which dead animal it should be modelled on and how gorey the carcass could be. We spent far too long looking at pictures of meat.

The other big thing was getting the music right. The tone was kind of up in the air until we found references that made it clear how slow and glamorous we wanted the spot to be. It had to be sexy.

Leo is a pretty impressive lion – how did his creation come about? Had you worked with animatronics much before (we don’t count the FRANK dog because he was fairly static)?

Leo is great but we didn't have much to do with the design, he was around for a couple of years before we came on the scene. We do know that he was made by a great animatronics outfit called Animated Extras.

We have worked quite a bit with animatronics in the past. We did a series of spots for Virgin Media last year where we got to create a whole menagerie of animals over the course of the campaign. We love to do things in camera whenever we can and animatronic puppets give you an amazing amount of spontaneity and immediacy. However, they can be a bit tricky. No one was easier to work with than Pablo (RIP. Never forget.)

The aesthetics reminded us of some kind of Lynchian cheese-dream. Were there direct influences like that for the art-dept? Did you have that style in mind when shooting?

A little bit. We wanted it to feel a bit off kilter, dreamy and stylized which is always going to evoke David Lynch. I'd like to think that anything cheese related was the particular flavour that we brought to the party ourselves.

We looked at the photography of Ryan Schude and Gregory Crewdson with the DOP. The sense of atmosphere they get in their images was something we were aiming for.

How was the shoot? Did you run into any issues?

We shot two 30s spots on the same day which is always a pretty harrowing way of working. It means you don't get as much time as you'd like to finesse things. This makes working with animatronics especially tricky as it's only when you get everything in place that you suddenly realize that some of the things you'd been planning aren't physically possible. The biggest nightmare on this shoot was trying to get Porchetta, the pig carcass, to get out of her seat.

Once the final film was assembled, did you worry it might ‘out-weird’ audiences? Did the client have any concerns?

I think people have a pretty high tolerance for weirdness, especially if it looks nice. We were happy with it, it made us laugh. That's kind of the best we can hope for. The client was totally on board. I think they just wanted to make something different.

Are you pleased with the response so far?

It seems to be going down well, which is always nice. The real test will be to hear what our mums think. We haven't shown it to them yet.