Kraken Rum – Advertising Shoot

NB Studios commissioned us to shoot a series of campaigns for Kraken Rum, all based around their very distinctive bottle. The brand identity was based on the idea of The Kraken, a mythical sea monster and the legends that surround it.

This was the second in the series and, as with all the of shoots, it posed a number of technical and logistical challenges! The art director was Sam Pittman, and he wanted the Kraken bottle to be swathed in dense, thick fog, suggesting the dangerous fogs you might get in the middle of the Atlantic.

After some initial off camera testing and exploration with various smoke machines we concluded that we would need a considerable amount of very thick smoke in a very condensed space. For this we need to produce much more smoke than a smoke machine could supply and so turned instead to smoke grenades.

Obviously, this wouldn’t work indoors as the studio would instantly fill with smoke.

The solution we came up with was to build the set outside of the studio on our small balcony, but with the camera remaining inside.

We built a tent to shield the camera from the smoke and waited for a helpful prevailing wind direction!

We then set off the cannisters and shot with an extremely high-speed flash.

This approach was repeatable, consistent and gave the agency plenty of great selects to choose from.