Absolut Vodka Research
_____________________________________________________________________________________
My project is to generate visuals for the Absolut vodka campaign, to begin with I decided it would first be a good idea to generate a list of words, which I though appropriate and would make a strong visual metaphor.
To do this I began by listing words which began with my two letters (T and O) and tried to create a mind map of my ideas. I came up with:
Tattoo  Test     Troupe                                                
Terror   Tax      Trivia                                      
Total    Town   Temper
Triple   Trinity  Tornado
Taste   Treason
Team   Tension
Tease  Triangle
Trouble
Tendril
Teak
Tear
Trip
Truth
Tangled
Test
Tongue
Tank
Trade
Trumpet
Trial
Tusk

 

Oxygen          Oil                   Original
Ostritch           Orbit                Ornate
Oven              Opaque          Osmosis
Ovulation        Omnivore        Outdated
Opium             Omnipotent
Orion               Olive
Outside           Oppresion
Override
Option
Old
Ogre
Oddity
Overreaction
Obscene
Oblong
Odour
Ox
Only
Oddity
Occasion
Odd
One
Oar
Official
Obvious
Obtrusion
Old fashioned
Onwards

Generating these lists allowed me to more easily assess, which words would be good for generating a poster and which words would not be very useful when generating a poster. The key elements which I looked for when choosing my words was
If I could visualize outcomes for the words
If the outcomes which I visualized were metaphoric or were very obvious
I first developed a set of 5 posters for the first crit of our work, only to discover from my lecturer that the exampled were indeed far too literal to consider metaphoric. This led me to side down and attempt to go through my list of words again more thoroughly, and find examples which would lead to a more metaphoric, yet visually pleasing final piece.
I did this process and ended up with a final, smaller list of words, which consisted of:

T:                                 O:
Tattoo                          Ogre
Turmoil                       Ornate
Tendril                         Outdated

These words in my opinion gave me clear visual images in my head which I believe would lead to stunning visuals. I set out to create visuals, which both were metaphoric but also displayed my ability in Photoshop and attention to detail when producing work.


Below are the examples of my final pieces for this aspect of the project, To come to these outcomes I both looked at other existing examples of other peoples work on the behance site and online and did several Photoshop tutorials in order to better finalize my final pieces, my main intention to create attractive visuals which were pleasing to the eye and draw upon culture specific references which people know.

Absolute ogre:

For this piece I looked through images of ogres both in mythology and in fairy tales and folklore, discovering that they are often depicted as oversized, stupid, hairy and mean. However, my final idea was to use the most well known of ogres in current western society, that being Shrek from the animated Disney classic.

I began by looking at Shrek and what ideals I could add from him to the bottle in order to make the visual. I decided upon Shreks iconic ears which hint towards the word ogre immediately however does not make it too obvious that it becomes a literal rather than a metaphoric. I decided to divert away from the green Shrek colour way and keep the poster with subtle black and white tones as I believe it was more visually pleasing than the garish green of Shrek and took away from the idea of using the ears and made the image more childish and unprofessional.

However, after completing the Shrek poster without the colour, it became apparent to me that the ears looked too much like taps and the images underlying message was lost, so I decided to go for a happy medium and use both the glassy effect and the Shrek skin texture in order to create a hybrid style image. After completing the image to a satisfactory level I then decided that it would be a good idea to add shading to the image to attempt to draw out the picture and make it look more realistic, after doing this I distorted the bottle template to make a more ogreish unperfected shape whilst still maintaining the bottle shape somewhat and used this image as my final piece, I am very happy with this particular final piece.

Absolut Tattoo Attempt 1
This was my first idea for "Absolut Tattoo" I was very happy with the effect however the image was far too literal so I decided to attempt a different style.

Absolut Tendril:

My reasoning for doing Absolut tendril is because I wanted to see what I could do with Photoshop in the way of making an interaction between my image and another image. I decided to attempt to make the transparent bottle look as if it were being grabbed by the squid with one of its long tentacles, to do this I have made the reflections of the bottle and the transparency defined, making the bottle the central focal point and the tentacle merely a helping piece. Originally I planned on using a green squid but I felt the sickly lime green took away from the image and became a contender for the focal point of the piece.

Absolut Outdated:
I have decided to do Absolut out-dated as it is my only word, which I feel, has negative connotations. This I thought would be interesting to do as the primary purpose of an advertisement is to display positivity, so how to do this with a negative starting word?
To do this I used an image of something out-dated that the audience of Absolut would relate to, in this case I attempted to make the image look similar to that of a tape player, I did this because I thought it would be interesting to attempt to make the two become one, My final image I was very pleased with and decided to keep it a simple black and white image as I found it to stand out nicely.

Absolut Turmoil:
For this piece I wanted to experiment with lighting, first having the idea to do a piece entitled "Absolut Thor" I realized this idea was too literal, for this reason i decided to research into trials and tribulations and came across the term turmoil, i feel this fit the image much better and made it a more metaphoric description.