“As the world’s leading premium gin brand, Bombay Sapphire incites creativity through a balanced and refined taste profile, offering the upmost versatility and a blank canvas for cocktail creation.”
English distillery Bombay Sapphire has enlisted “Moulin Rouge!” and “Elvis” filmmaker Baz Luhrmann as Creative Director of their “Saw This Made This” global campaign.
“Saw This Made This” is a global movement that seeks to embolden people to be creative. It’s an open invitation to everyone to take an image or a video of something you SAW out in the real world, and then share an image or a video of what you MADE based on that initial inspiration. It doesn’t matter what you come up with, it can be small, it can be grand, just take ordinary moments and turn them into something extraordinary.
“I truly believe that everyone is inherently creative, no matter who you are, where you come from, or what you do.” says Luhrmann, “You don’t have to be labelled an artist to be considered a creative. If you just give yourself permission to see the world as a gallery of inspiration and reframe how you think about things, you’ll unlock a part of yourself you didn’t know existed. By partnering with Bombay Sapphire, I want to encourage people everywhere to think about how they can turn the ordinary into the extraordinary and share this inspiration to make the world a more creatively nurturing place.”
In his role as Creative Director of the campaign, Luhrmann worked with advertising Director Juan Cabral to produce the film Saw This, Made This, an examination of Cabral’s own poetic expression and his pursuit of beauty in everyday scenes in the streets of his hometown Buenos Aires.
Cabral has won every major award in the world of advertising, including more than 25 Cannes Lions and two Cannes Grand Prix. He wrote and directed the famous Gorilla commercial for Cadbury, one of the most popular ads of all time. In 2019, Variety called his ópera prima “Two/One” a “beautifully presented debut” and “an exceptionally well-made film, from an undeniably talented filmmaker.”
Bombay Sapphire and Baz Luhrmann are inviting the public to view the world as an infinite source of inspiration and celebrate creativity. Share your creations on social media with the hashtag #SawThisMade to join the live Bombay Sapphire gallery.
With the support of Bombay Sapphire, we will celebrate the culmination of the #SawThisMadeThis campaign during World Creativity Day in April [2023]. There’s no limit to what you can contribute to the initiative and I’m so excited to help inspire this next generation of creatives,” said Luhrmann.
While most gins achieve their flavour by boiling their botanicals directly in the spirit, Bombay Sapphire utilises a Vapour Infusion processwhere the flavours of the botanicals are captured, resulting in the fresh and vibrant taste of BOMBAY SAPPHIRE. The vibrancy of Bombay goes hand in hand with a vibrant film maker.
From his very first film “Strictly Ballroom” in 1992, Baz Luhrmann managed to establish a very distinctive, personal style. With saturated colours, frantic editing, and grandiose production design, his movies are operatic odes to beauty and excess. In his films, the flamboyant production design — done by longtime collaborator and wife Catherine Martin — takes centre stage, almost becoming a character on its own.
Luhrmann borrows from the theatre the concept of Verfremdungseffekt — the word means “distancing effect” in German, — doing everything in his power to make the audience fully aware that what is being experienced is “just” a movie. Contrary to filmmaking that seeks to immerse the audience in an illusion of reality, Luhrmann explicitly tears down any pretence of realism in his movies, with a mise-en-scène that is unapologetically artificial, theatrical, and extravagant. He doesn’t want to convince you that what you’re seeing is “real”. What Luhrmann wants is the complete contrary, to take you on a ride into an imaginary world that can only exist on film.
This idea of “distancing” the spectator from the work was thoroughly explored by the influential German playwright Bertolt Brecht during the ‘50s, and since then has been developed in cinema by auteurs like Jean-Luc Godard, Peter Greenaway, and more recently, Wes Anderson.
The “Saw This Made This” global campaign is not the first collaboration between Baz Luhrmann and Bombay Sapphire. In 2019 Bombay Sapphire gin brought Baz Luhrmann to host a celebrity dinner to celebrate the opening of the Los Angeles branch of the international art fair Frieze.
“We are thrilled to be collaborating with incredible, visionary creative champions on our latest mission to stir creativity in people around the world,” says Natasha Curtin, Global Vice President of Bombay Sapphire, “for over thirty years, Bombay Sapphire has collaborated with creators and artists with the purpose of giving support to and building a platform for creative self-expression. Like Baz, we believe in the importance of creativity – it is an essential part of what makes us human. With this campaign, we set out to show that creative inspiration is everywhere and to encourage people to reconnect with their own creative side.”
Visit Bombay Sapphire’s Saw This Made This site to watch, listen, and share your creative inspiration
today.