The shoot, which took place Nov. 21-22, 2013 (pre-production took place Nov. 20), gave Pantone an opportunity to present its brand to the world through both print and digital media. Pantone secured the services of its agency of record, design firm Sub Rosa, which in turn tapped New York lighting design and live event production company kayneLIVE to meet the creative expectations of the campaign. Through the use of lighting technology, kayneLIVE, Sub Rosa and photographer Sarah Silver created — and captured — a world that was, quite simply, saturated in light.
“Sub Rosa pitched [Pantone] the idea of using light to paint a world,” says Benji Kayne, founder and CXO (chief experience officer) of kayneLIVE, who explains that “Make It Brilliant” was his first print campaign. “The associate creative director [Diego Marini], the client and myself — just sat down and started to narrow down creative concepts: ‘What are different ways we can paint a world with light?’”
That was the million-dollar question, one that called for bold creative solutions and precision in lighting technology and application.
Triptych
Established in 1963, Pantone is an internationally recognized authority on color, perhaps best known for its innovative Pantone Matching System, a standard used by an estimated 100 million designers in fields such as fashion, graphics, beauty and lifestyle, and manufacturing.
“With a color standard, the designer and manufacturer can communicate, match colors, and be on the same page,” says Lantelme.
For decades, Pantone has largely been a behind-the-scenes inspirational force impacting many industries. The “Make It Brilliant” which had existed in Pantone’s corporate culture, was a bold promotional step, one that would thrust the company and its operations into mainstream consciousness.
“Internally it was a rallying cry,” says Lantelme. “It is really an invitation to engage.”
To represent the three major sectors of the company’s core business (graphics, fashion + home and plastics), Sub Rosa developed the idea of presenting powerful visuals, visuals that were suitably and simultaneously concrete and yet abstract, within the framework of a tri-panel composite scene, or triptych. Five different lighting designs were created for each section of the triptych, totaling 15 panels. You can have some fun and click across each visual option on the campaign’s official page, pantone.com/makeitbrilliant. (Each of the three main images of the triptych was shot separately.)
The “modularity” of the advertising campaign not only highlights different aspects of the company’s bread and butter, but also helps to target specific industries. “Sub Rosa came up with the idea of showing ‘graphics’ as a two-dimensional section, which is the first portion of the triptych,” says Lantelme. “The center, or second panel, relates to the ‘fashion + home’ division, where you start to see texture, playing on the weave of a fabric. The last portion of the triptych, ‘plastics’, emphasizes three-dimensionality and deep gradations of color.”
The use of ballerinas in this campaign underscores the elegant dance between lighting and environment present in these images. The three nimble, limber and sculpted dancers (Jenna Pollack, Jaqlin Medlock and Natalie Mackessy) interact and even perform with square and cube props symbolic of the Pantone “chip” logo. “When you look at the last triptych, or the far-right-hand side,” says Lantelme, “you’ll see the two-dimensional chip has been transformed into a three-dimensional cube to represent our plastics division.”
What Is “Brilliant?”
One of the major challenges facing Sub Rosa was creating a lighting design that could communicate the notion of “brilliant.” Although far from vague, “brilliant” is certainly open for interpretation, a situation that could have easily translated into a potential minefield for the creative team.
“Brilliant has lots of connotations,” says Lantelme. “Brilliance gets noticed. Brilliant also means smart. It was also speaks to the audience: ‘You make it brilliant.’”
Kayne doesn’t recall having an official meeting with Pantone that addressed the actual definition of the word, and, instead, was often guided by his gut feelings. “I wouldn’t be surprised if that was deliberate,” Kayne says. “In my mind, ‘striking’ was always a synonym for brilliance. I used the concept of emotional resonance in the colors. It was about looking at the color and getting that instinctual feeling, like, ‘Does this invoke emotion? Does it resonant with me?’”
Color and Vibrancy
During the process of putting this piece together, PLSN had discussed the global reach of the advertising campaign with Pantone. Since the company was an international concern, were any colors off limits or offensive in foreign markets? The short answer is that Kayne and Sub Rosa were not prohibited from using certain color palettes for the shoot, but Pantone knew it needed to stay on point. “There are color palettes that are forecast for autumn and winter 2014, spring and summer 2015,” says Lantelme. “There were reasons we wanted these combinations. We definitely gave [the colors to be used] a lot of forethought. The vice president of the Pantone Color Institute [Laurie Pressman] worked directly with the creative at Sub Rosa. We were specific about getting close to the colors that we wanted to use.”
Although Kayne and Sub Rosa had a wide bandwidth from which to choose, they still had the monumental task of matching the vibrancy of Pantone’s standard colors with the output from generated by available lighting fixtures. No easy feat.
“The amount of ambient light, color temperature of the lamps, throw, the shade of white on the wall, all the aspects you take into consideration when doing lighting, are amplified when you’re trying to match a color so closely,” says Kayne. “There was definitely pressure to find unique colors to match the Pantone color system, I’ll say that. We went out of our way to pick these palettes and tweak them on site. For instance, the green that you see is by no means the green we started with. We were working off a grandMA2 board and we are scrolling back and forth on the color wheel and getting the exact color we wanted, and every single time we hit it, all of us involved in the creative said, ‘That’s it.’ We all knew it the moment we saw it. There was very little deliberation.”
It may be difficult to fathom from the finished results, but the studio was a world of white — stacked boxes, floating open cubes, pristine ballerina unitards — offering the perfect canvases for wash lighting. (Brooklyn-based Square Design, Inc., fabricated the foam structures of the set.)
Choosing the right fixtures was crucial, as well, to achieving the proper effect: Kayne relied on a small stash provided by 4Wall Entertainment, including Vari*Lite VL3500 Spots and VL3500 Washes for primary lighting and LED battens and Chroma-Q Color Force 72s for background lighting and backfill. (The onsite lighting operator and programmer was Jeff Nellis.) kayneLIVE also used Vari*Lite L1100 AS Arc lamps, “so that we could get that nice contrasting white out of the patterns,” says Kayne, “as well as have a powerful enough blast to penetrate the VL3500s, which are obviously very strong.
“Because of some of the changes thrown at us on site, the features of these lights became integral to being able to pull off the campaign successfully,” Kayne continues. “One of my lighting designers, Rob Cangemi [Cangemi Design, LLC], worked in advance on a lot of our angles and sightlines. When we got to Windmill for the shoot, the lighting grid that had existed when we’d done our site surveys had changed. It was at a different height in places, so we had to redraw all our lines from scratch.”
Consistent & “Inconsistent” Shadows
Application of shadow effects was another important feature contributing to the overall success of the shoot. Says Kayne, shadows helped to “maintain the geometry of all the different shapes you see in the photos. In our mind, we thought that having a lot of really stark shadows could show the contrast between the luminosity of the colors. However, we also worried that if we got on site and had too many shadows we needed to make sure we had the ability to properly fill [with lighting]. So, the Color Forces did the background wash as well as the backfill. What we ended up realizing was that we only needed the Color Force once or twice for a tiny bit of fill from below. But our primary coloring was done with the Vari*Lite VL3500 Spots and Washes.
“One of the things we struggled with was, ‘Does the physics of the shadows need to be consistent throughout the triptych?” Kayne continues. “‘If a shadow is coming from straight overhead in, say, the center [panel], does the shadow need to look as though it’s being cast from the same point in the other two panels?’ We decided that the answer is, ‘No.’ In fact, we thought it was [more awesome] if there was this … suspense of disbelief by breaking the [laws of physics] in the final triptych. [We moved the lights] around to make sure that the shadows were exactly where we wanted them to be and that they grab your attention without being too distracting. We used matching [Vari*Lite] spot and wash fixtures and were able to blend colors to create enough of a base to allow shadows to mellow out a little. Although we didn’t move fixtures as much as we expected we would, we put lighting units on stacks of road cases, which helped us keep, if this makes any sense, a consistency in our inconsistent shadows.”
Gobos were also instrumental in adding the proper texturing. “We worked with a lot of different patterns,” Kayne says, “because we wanted to show how these colors and [gobo-created] lines helped translate Pantone’s different [business] concepts. We also used old-school photography flags and cardboard to cut the gobos exactly where we needed them.”
The viewer can be the ultimate judge, but it wouldn’t be a stretch to proclaim that what Kayne, Sub Rosa, photographer Silver and Pantone achieve with “Make It Brilliant” is purely and simply beautiful. Indeed. Minimal retouching was done to the finished photos (i.e. ironing out wrinkles in the ballerinas’ uniforms). If this were a test the creative team (pardon the pun) passed with flying colors.
“The creative direction to the photographer was to capture the essence of the live experience, especially with the dancers, to make it feel as though they were performing for us in the room,” says Kayne. “Everything you see there was created in-frame, on camera, live. We did not retouch color. We almost did too good of a job, because people assumed the images were shaded in Adobe Photoshop. Obviously we worked together on light levels to make sure it would translate to photography.”
“Being able to say our equipment was used on a campaign like Pantone’s ‘Make It Brilliant’ is an honor,” says Al Ridella, general manager of 4Wall Entertainment New York. “The Pantone color systems are used worldwide in graphics, fashion, plastics and more. They are absolutely an authority on color, so you knew going in that their team would require lighting that could create the exact looks they needed. It’s great to know the fixtures we have in inventory were able to showcase the colors in the new campaign and meet their exacting standards.”
“It was just wonderful how the light was able to help us communicate the concept of ‘Make It Brilliant,’” says Lantelme.
“One of the things that people say, even if they weren’t there at the shoot, is this idea of being immersed in [the environment],” says Kayne. “You also have to keep in mind that what you’re seeing is only a two-D representation of it, as well. So, when I hear people say these things like, ‘I feel like I’m being bathed in light,’ I know that we’ve nailed our creative goals and the mission of the brand on this campaign.”
Crew
Client Reps: Karen Lantelme/Pantone; Laurie Pressman/Pantone Color Institute
Ad/Branding Agency: Sub Rosa
Campaign Photography: Windmill Studios
Photographer: Sarah Silver
Lighting Designers: Benji Kayne/kayneLIVE; Rob Cangemi/Cangemi Design
Associate Creative Director: Diego Marini/kayneLIVE
Lighting Operator/Programmer: Jeff Nellis
Lighting Supplier: 4Wall Entertainment
4Wall Rep: Al Ridella
Set Design/Fabrication: Square Design Inc.
Models/Dancers: Jenna Pollack, Jaqlin Medlock and Natalie Mackessy
Gear
1 grandMA2 console
8 Vari*Lite VL3500 Spots
5 Vari*Lite VL3500 Washes
4 Vari*Lite VL1100AS Arc ERS fixtures
4 Chroma-Q Color Force 72 LED RGBAs
