Dewar's Magma
Dewar’s
•
Liquid
•
Glass
Dewar's Magma.
Dewar's Magma is made in casks fired with volcanic magma stones, so the set had to be that process rather than an atmosphere borrowed from it. The problem is that the process is invisible. The heat happens inside a sealed cask, before the liquid ever reaches a bottle, and there is nothing to point a camera at. So we built it instead. The cracked black slab stands for the stone, the molten orange fissures running through it stand for the heat those stones carry into the wood, and the bottle sits down inside the rock at the depth the char takes place rather than standing on top of a surface. Every element in frame maps onto a step in making the whisky, which is what I want from whisky campaign photography.
Fire is the key for the same reason. The fissures are the only light source, strong enough to model the bottle and the rock, with everything outside them allowed to fall to charcoal and a hard side rake left in only to pick up the stone texture. Shot overhead and kept extremely low key, so the eye follows the heat. The slab was a build, not a plate. Cracked black rock made to hold the bottle at the right depth, with the fissures placed where the light needed to come from, which is the part that makes the overhead angle work. Shot in London by David Lineton. Set design: Olivia Clifford. Set build: Gareth Johnson.
More projects
