Canadian Filmmakers Festival breaks campaign
By Adnews Staff
The Toronto-based Canadian Filmmakers Festival has begun a multimedia marketing campaign to promote this year’s event. The festival, which will run from March 22 to 25, promotes Canadian filmmaking talent. The campaign, developed by GJP Advertising of Toronto, portrays Canadian films as, “Films from a land cooler than Hollywood.” Three television commercials have been created, each one parodying a well-known Hollywood movie. In the first, a shark swims through dark water toward a victim while ominous music plays in the background. When the shark attacks, however, it only succeeds in cracking the ice covering the surface. An ice fisherman looks around for the source of the noise, then resumes fishing. In the second ad, a spaceship appears in the sky above the same fisherman and communicates by playing the opening music from a hockey game. In the third ad, a Terminator-style robot appears naked on the ice in front of the fisherman, scans him, then takes his clothes. Three print ads are also being used in the campaign, parodying the films Superman, Poltergeist and Jaws. “The festival’s target doesn’t buy into the hype of typical Hollywood movies, so we took some classic films and considered how they’d play out successfully, or unsuccessfully, in Canada,” said Alan Gee, chief creative officer at GJP Advertising. “We ended up with a great campaign that celebrates Canadian truisms and some classic Canadian deadpan delivery in the commercials.”