digital dharma

Digital Dharma
Hal Stucker. Photo District News. (Eastern ed.). New York: Feb 2008. Vol. 28, Iss. 2; pg. 112, 3 pgs

Abstract (Summary)
EURO RSCG WORLDWIDE RECENTLY CREATED A PRINT campaign for Wasa whole-grain crisp breads that cleverly associate the wholesome snack with the ancient practice of yoga. The images also contain a striking number of visual puns based on the motifs common to Nepalese paintings: apple slices arranged to resemble a lotus blossom, green beans laid together to resemble a halo, and kiwi slices in the shape of two faces-mirror images of each other-that look down on the scene below and seem to shine with an inner light.
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Full Text (1565 words)
Copyright VNU eMedia, Inc. Feb 2008
[Headnote]
A series of ads for a healthy snack took inspiration from the ancient practice of yoga, and the modern practice of Photoshop.
EURO RSCG WORLDWIDE RECENTLY CREATED A PRINT campaign for Wasa whole-grain crisp breads that cleverly associate the wholesome snack with the ancient practice of yoga. Art director Paul Chiemmongkoltip brought the idea to fruition with the help of photographer Kate Turning and retoucher Amy Dressers. The series of ads was based loosely on Nepalese thangka paintings. These are a colorful type of Buddhist religious paintings traditionally used to teach about the life of the Buddha. The Wasa thangka, however, would feature a young female yoga practitioner surrounded by healthy fruits and vegetables, temptingly laid out on the company's whole-grain crackers.
Dresser describes the Wasa ads as "Kaleidoscopic-sort of fantasy, high-key color images with a central figure and a flurry of stuff going on around them, so your eye goes all over the page."Turning says that her images had to suggest a "mystical world of health and well-being," so each element had to have a mysterious, floating quality.
While Turning and Chiemmongkoltip were shooting the food and the yoga practitioners, Dresser first tackled the backgrounds, creating them from several stock images. "The art director wanted them to basically be the Himalayas, but not exactly, with more of an illustration feel to the foreground and the clouds," Dresser recalls. Each line of background mountains is subtly different due to Dresser's manipulations, with "slight variations," she says. "The main mountain line and the skies are similar, but the clouds are more painterly in some and fading more in others."
Though Chiemmongkoltip had drawn up what Dresser described as a very tight layout, the choice of colors for the background was left mostly up to her. The retoucher was relieved to find that she could be more experimental with tints and tones and wasn't tied down to, say, matching a specific Pantone color. Dresser also did a considerable amount of hand painting, for example adding several layers of mist to the mountains. For this, she says, she used a "weak little fuzzy zero-percent hardness brush that I labored over them with, trying to make them look fake and real at the same time."
Dresser carefully amplified the highlights on the clouds and mountains, giving the overall light a somewhat otherworldly effect. "That's one of my main missions in most of the images I work on: making the highlights look as nice and as pretty as I can possibly get away with." The background was given an overall tint with a hue saturation layer, and then very specific color adjustments were applied to small parts of the image using color adjustment layers.
"There was no one layer that would either make or break the whole thing, just a lot of them put in doing tiny adjustments." Dresser ultimately ended up with a big folder full of adjustment layers for the background, usually about 15 to 20 for each background image.
To place the cracker, food and yoga figure elements into each shot, Dresser began by cutting the items from the backgrounds by hand. "I do most of my work using Photoshop paint tools, and really don't use things like vectors very often," she says. "Most of the images here were shot on white, so it was easy to isolate them from the backgrounds using channels, and then I traced around the edges and painted the masks in by hand. I've found that when I use shortcuts, cleaning up the edges sometimes takes as long as it does when I'm doing it all by hand."
She also took special care in cutting out the crackers. "I really was careful to cut out all the nooks and crannies on them, because I knew that they'd really care about the product looking as genuine as possible. So I didn't cut off the little imperfections or even out the bumpsI was very loyal to what the product actually looked like."
The images also contain a striking number of visual puns based on the motifs common to Nepalese paintings: apple slices arranged to resemble a lotus blossom, green beans laid together to resemble a halo, and kiwi slices in the shape of two faces-mirror images of each other-that look down on the scene below and seem to shine with an inner light. To create the kiwi effect, Dresser modified a mask she had hand-drawn for one of the figures seen in profile. "I started with that, but then we wanted to make the face look more like it was drawn and less photographic, so I did some tweaking on the mask, giving it more or less forehead, more full lips, trying to make it look a little softer." She then put in a darker outer edging on the face to set it off from the background, painting the tone in using a separate curve layer laid over the top.
The series has been very successful, with ads running in both the U.S. and Europe. And the campaign apparently has good karma to spare. Dresser, a vegetarian, took home several packages left over from the shoot and her boyfriend started eating them. And even though the initial freebies are long gone, he now goes out and buys Wasa.
[Sidebar]
AMY DRESSER
Phone: (323) 662-6377
E-mail: someone@urbancom.net
Web: www.amydresser.com
Principal Contact:
Amy Dresser is represented by Kate Chase Presents
Contact: Kate Chase
Address: 40 Arago Street, San Francisco, CA 94112
Phone: (415) 337-1700
E-mail: kate@katechase.com
Equipment: Power Mac Gii with a quad-core processor, eight gigs of RAM; Mitsubishi Diamond Pro monitor with an Envision LCD for menus; a Wacom Pen Tablet, Photoshop CS2
Sample Clients:
Bacardi, UPN Networks, CBS1TNT Networks, Best Buy, Kodak, Honda, Proctor & Gamble, Pepsi, RJ Reynolds, Smuckers, Warner Brothers Records, Atlantic Records, Entertainment Weekly, Time, Maxim
Grain of truth. Opposite page: The final ad for Wasa Is based loosely on Nepalese thankga paintings. The imagery was shot by Kate Turning and the extensive post-production was done by Amy Dressers. Left: Two ads from the same campaign. Above: The various elements that made up the final ad.
TIPS AND TRICKS
COLOR PALETTE AND CONTRAST-Dresser had to create a separate color scheme for each image, similar in nature to the colors on the original Buddhist paintings she was imitating, which were very bright and very highly saturated. "I'm not that scientific a retoucher," she says, "I'm not that mathematical, so that fact that I didn't have to match a specific Pantone color and that I could just make the colors look good to my eye was a huge weight off my shoulders."
As a general matter of style, Dresser tries to make things look "fake and real at the same time," usually by hand painting to amplify highlights and deepen shadows, though she says she is "usually more focused on highlights than she is on shadows," trying to make the highlights "a little more amplified than they ever could be in real life." For the Wasa images, the idea was to give the clouds in the background an "imaginary, mystical, unrealistic look and feel. They all began from shots of real clouds, and I used that as a template, but sampled different parts of that image, and then painted over it on several layers-dark, light and medium-painting over the light and dark areas to amplify them, and particularly trying to amplify the highlights as much as I can get away with."
TWEAKING THE YOGA FIGURES-Symmetry was also critical to making them work as a takeoff on the Nepalese paintings. Each image had a separate model, and all of them also had to look as though they were expert yoga practitioners, shining with the inner glow of enlightenment. This meant Dresser had to do a fair amount of tweaking in order to make the figures look both symmetrical and also to make them appear to be holding their yoga postures correctly. "I feel the most at home retouching people," says Dresser. "With these, there was a little bit of cheating, there are some parts that are flips, to make them more symmetrical than they actually were, and there was also some tweaking of the poses."
For example, one model's knees needed to be brought down to get her into a correct half-lotus position. Another model was holding a pose that involved standing on one leg. This made her shift her weight, so that the top portion of her body was leaning slightly over in one direction. Here, Dresser had to straighten her spine. For all the models, "I drew a bunch of guidelines to make sure that elbows were at the same level, that shoulders were even and that torsos were straight up and down." For this Dresser used mostly cut-and-paste. "I'm not a big fan of the liquefy tool, and with some of the adjustments on these models, they were fairly severe. It wasn't just a matter of smooshing in an arm here or there; I had to create a whole new angle for some of their limbs. They weren't really heavy-duty adjustments, but I did have to work out the symmetry of the body before I started masking it all out."
Above: More elements that were composited into the final ad. The retoucher describes the ads as "fantasy, high-key color images with a central figure and flurry of stuff going on around them."

Indexing (document details)
Subjects:
Yoga, Mountains, Color
Author(s):
Hal Stucker
Document types:
Feature
Document features:
Photographs
Section:
CREATE TOUCH OF CLASS
Publication title:
Photo District News. (Eastern ed.). New York: Feb 2008. Vol. 28, Iss. 2; pg. 112, 3 pgs
Source type:
Periodical
ISSN:
10458158
ProQuest document ID:
1432861681
Text Word Count
1565
Document URL:
http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1432861681&sid=7&Fmt=3&clientId=19371&RQT=309&VName=PQD