A wonderful little piece of wonderment for your day… 

Above, an ad for the new Canon Pixma printer, below, the making of the ad. To create what you see above, they put drops of paint on a membrane over a speaker, and then when they played a sound through the speaker, it made the paint bounce up, and they caught the action at 5,000 frames per second.  That’s a lot of frames per second.

The result is ultra-clear slow motion video of tiny bits of gelatinous color exploding into the air.

Canon Pixma: Bringing colour to life from Dentsu London on Vimeo.

The ad itself is wonderfully captivating, and the making-of film, if it’s publicized, will be an interesting combination of the two trends I’ve been talking about on this blog related to advertising… the short film approach (Chanel, GANT) and the “real people” approach (Tod’s by Eliot Erwitt and Cole Haan by the Selby), where the photographer him/herself is known and hyped (not just a tiny credit somewhere), and the subjects are real people who use the product (not actors) and are identified.  In this case, it’s not exactly the first or the second, but still carries the themes of a well-crafted story and a behind-the-scenes, “we’re not a nameless, faceless corporation” tone.  Interesting here that they even reveal who the advertising agency behind the project was…