JWT Gives Us a Close-Up of its New Canon Campaign

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Yesterday JWT London released the second part of the Canon Come and See campaign, called Urban Deer [above]. The quietly beautiful film, shot by Academy's Jonathan Glazer, shows a herd of deer exploring residential streets in Essex.

Urban Deer, from the Canon creative team of copywriter Jonathan Budds [below left], art director Anita Davis [below right] and creative director Adam Scholes [below centre], is the follow up to September's Gladiator Football, which also explored an unusual and off-the-beaten-track event, albeit a far more visceral one.

Below Budds gives us the lowdown on the campaign, how they found out about the free-running deer and the patience needed to pull the film together. 

This second iteration of the Canon campaign is very different from the first; why did you want to go in such a different direction?

The campaign tries to inspire people to take more interesting and compelling photographs, and suggest that there are an endless number of opportunities to take these photographs no matter what your personal interest. So it seemed essential to initially show two ends of the visual scale – day/night, action/stillness, people/animals – to make the case.

In accordance with the campaign being about real but relatively unknown events, how did you find out about the deer appearing at this location, and where is it exactly?

The location is close to Epping Forest in Essex and, particularly when the weather is cold and the ground hard, the deer from the forest find 'easy pickings' on the lawns and verges of the nearby housing estate. We initially saw a documentary on urban wildlife in which these same deer featured and went from there. The pack is about 400 strong.

Why did you think this would be an ideal situation to shoot for the campaign?

Because the campaign is about not photographing the obvious, but looking 'deeper', one of the few guidelines we have is to convey a sense that within the familiar something highly unfamiliar is happening, whether it be a tribal, brutal sports event within a city of high culture and refined taste like Florence, or a pack of wild deer wandering around an urban housing estate.

Striking visual juxtapositions are what we're looking for, and want to share with viewers. There seemed to be an utterly uncontrived magic to the situation, an opportunity to show animals as they are rarely shown in advertising.

Is there a whole list of other events which you may cover and are they all different from each other?

We have a bank of potential stories and yes, the idea is that any progressed must give the viewer something visually different to the preceding films.

What was the shoot like and how much control over it did you/Jonathan really have?

Cold. Long. Nervous. Wild animals take direction from no one, not even Jonathan Glazer; but in truth we didn't want too much control as it seemed contrary to the spirit of the deer – and the campaign.

Research told us that the animals took specific routes around the estate and those routes were rigged with a total of 21 cameras inside various types of hide and 'baited' with mushed apples (the more rotten the better, supposedly). Then it was just a question of waiting. You have to be open–minded with a campaign like this… and endlessly optimistic.

How long did it take to get the shots you needed?

Eight nights in total.                                                                                               

What did Jonathan bring to the project?

Absolute dedication. Total confidence. Complete involvement at every stage. A compulsion to produce something different. A crew of like-minded people. Some poor jokes. The strange sight of a man smoking a cigarette with an electric blue light at the end (he vapes manically).

What was the hardest part of putting the film together?

Once we knew that we had enough footage and the right shots to make the film progress in the way we wanted it to, there were a number (a high number) of debates about whether we needed to show the estate – the residents and their activities – at daytime, to establish the urban ordinariness of the location and so make the contrast ring louder.

In the end we decided that there were plenty of signifiers in the roads and houses and that we could also do the job with the soundtrack.