Cliff Joins The Beatles

In 1969, there was no internet, no YouTube, no Facebook… how on earth did people find out about things!?

Let me introduce you to the latest show which I have been given the opportunity to design the complete marketing collateral. It’s called ‘Cliff Joins The Beatles’, and it’s a musical fantasy starring Marty Rhone & the Beatle Boys. The show plays on the idea of what would happen if Cliff Richard joined the Beatles after his split with the Shadows in 1969. Quite an interesting concept, and an equally as interesting (or challenging) advertising campaign would be needed to help bring the fantasy to life.

In order to make it as convincing as possible, I had to thoroughly investigate how an event of this nature would be presented via the media if it were to happen during the subject era. There was no internet, no YouTube, no Facebook… how on earth did people find out about things!? Well… television was going through a golden era, but newspapers were still the primary form of media used to inform people of the what’s what and the who’s who! That gave me a good starting point, so I decided make it look as if all the marketing consisted of materials prevalent in the late 60s.

The first to be designed were the posters and print materials, which were specifically styled to look like an old 60s newspaper headline front page. Not only did this enable us to create a lot of visual impact (with the bold lettering and convincing newspaper design), it also played along with the whole alternate reality, or in this case: the music fantasy which the concert is going for.

Flyer

Poster

Second was the website. This was probably one of the hardest to pull off because I somehow needed to combine modern tech (the internet) with old tech (print material) to provide users a consistent yet functional experience, reflective of the era in terms of style at least. I achieved this by combining the design of the newspaper posters and a modern news website. Basically: it’s what the CNN or SMH website would be today, if they employed a 1960s graphic designer to do all their visuals!

Website front page

Lastly, there was the TV commercial…

There’s something odd about filming a TV commercial using new technology, only to “age” the whole thing by about 40 years.

We’ve all seen file footage of the Beatles: hysterical girls, smiling faces, and concerts filled with so much screaming that you can’t actually hear any music. That’s what we were going for! We had to film the commercial using our very modern, full colour cameras and it was probably the first time I have ever used the term “overkill” with regards to the technology at our disposal. Then we proceeded to “age” the footage and make it consistent with the old black and white Beatles file footage.

This process wasn’t as simple as you would think, and you were probably thinking “just make it black and white, increase the contrast and voila!”. This wouldn’t work because there are still a lot of technology used in modern cameras to enhance the footage that did not exist back then, so we tried to synthetically remove everything our nice, new, modern cameras were doing to make our footage look so darn good!

In order to make it truly convincing it required a combination of techniques such as nose generation, gate shifting, splotching, flickering, scratching, blurring, warping, and that was only the video! The audio endured the same acoustic destruction such as filtering, EQ, acoustic modulation and a range of tricks to make it all sound 40 years old. The end result was footage so convincing it matched perfectly with the stock/file footage of the screaming girls we cut into the ad, which were actually shot from that era.

The end result was pretty awesome! See below…

So there you have it, all 3 elements combined (print, web and video) to make up a pretty convincing period campaign that serves to enhance the music fantasy that would have been: Cliff Joins The Beatles!

Now all I need it some young teenagers to show the footage to and try and convince them it actually happened!

for more information about the show, visit: www.cliffjoinsthebeatles.com