RAM
PRODUCTION PROCESS
Dust. Sweat. Blood. Metal Type.
The nobilty of work. The value of dust, sweat and blood. The markings of those who aspire to achieve greatness. They represent more than the traits of those we admire. They represent the soul. The Richards group wanted to create a spot that tied into their “Guts. Glory. Ram” campaign for Dodge Ram that would live along side and tie together their existing print and on-air material. The existing print material featured typographic headlines formed out of metal letterpress blocks and the commercials intent was to provide the stylistic connection between the print and future aired spots acting almost as a teaser to the entire campaign.
Shooting in the International Printing Museum
In order to be successful, the spot had to communicate the hard craftsmanship and skill that goes into typesetting. The tone had to be gritty and raw, yet portray a sense of precision. I wanted to photograph the individual strands of ink as they separate from the roller onto the metal type, the imperfections on the letterforms and the dirt under the fingernails. The choice was to shoot macro on the Arri Alexa for most of the shots in order to photograph these intricate textural details otherwise unseen.
Production Design
During the spot, we see the typesetter at work meticulously assembling individual blocks of metal type and securing them in place on the printing bed. As the story progresses, it is revealed that the craftsman is in fact assembling the end tag which ultimately reads “Guts. Glory. Ram” and features the Ram truck badge. The problem for production was that the typefaces used in the campaign were not available as physical type so they had to be constructed from scratch using digital type as reference.
Production designer Jahmin Assa, led his team to fabricate every letter including the truck badge to give them the correct texture and finish in order to match with the existing metal components at the museum. The resulting end tag payoff was typeset using a mixture of specially handcrafted letters assembled carefully within a framework of metal furniture.
