Entertainment
Source: zestradar.com
It’s not a surprise that there’s a lot of product placement in movies, which can be very obvious and off-putting, or when done well, it becomes a very clever advertising trick. You see your favourite character always munching on a certain cereal or waffle brand and suddenly you start craving that specific thing too. It’s been done for years and it’s a very successful advertising move, but what if we went a step further?
When you think about it, the Lego movie is all a massive ad for Lego. Sure, there’s a funny plot and a lot of special effects, but you know people are going to want to buy a lego figure or a whole set after watching that. Well, Lance Ford, who works as a creative director at EP+Co has taken this idea even further. His job often has him developing content for social media and since he’s worked with both big entertainment brands like Netflix and Paramount and consumer brands he has unique insight into the world of advertising.
Lance genuinely loves advertising and entertainment so he thought it would be a fun idea to see what it would look like if brands were movies. So he armed himself with creative thinking and Photoshop and got to work. You can see the results of his work on his Instagram account BrandNameFilms. Some of his masterpieces include Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson as Mr Clean, Vince Vaungh as the Green Giant, Hugh Jackman as Mr Pringle, Emma Watson as Betty Crocker and so on.
It should be noted that Lance has never had to create actual movie posters before but he took classic ones as inspiration and then let his imagination run wild. You know, it’s not exactly rocket science. If you do a bit of research into movie posters or just look at a few, you’ll soon start noticing similarities and certain classic trends. The back to back pose is very popular and you’ll see that in Lance’s creations too, then there are the very popular floating faces of main characters, etc.
Lance says that it generally takes him about two hours to create his original posters and a lot of that time is actually spent on finding good quality photos. After he’s done with research it’s all a matter of some photoshop editing and adding details and it’s done.
When picking which brands to make into movies he generally likes to start with brands that have an existing and more or less famous mascot. So, for example, the Energizer Bunny, the leprechaun from Lucky Charms or the Philsbury chef. It’s much easier to come up with an idea for a movie plot when there’s already a mascot with a bit of backstory. Other times he’ll just try to think of actors who could represent the brand in some way.
Lance also tries to pick actors and actresses that have a social media presence and are active on social media platforms like Twitter or Instagram. That way he can tag them and there’s a chance they might actually see it and share his work with a larger audience. Lance says he’s never really seen a brand be the center of a movie, but the way things are going he can see Hollywood try to develop a brand mascot into a movie at some point in the future and he only hopes that his posters can move that idea along.
When asked what were his favourite posters to make Lance says it’s hard to pick, all of them were fun to make but Chester Cheetah and Wendy’s are probably the ones that stand out to him the most. We, on the other hand, find the idea of Ryan Reynolds as the Philsbury chef to be hilariously brilliant and would definitely watch that movie if it was ever made. Leonardo DiCaprio as the guy from Quaker Oats is pretty awesome too.
