Consol Glass gets down to the nitty-gritty

Telling the story of glass through alchemic reactions, cellular structure, and firey cuts, Grey/Johannesburg evokes the idea glass through components without showing off the final product.  

With beautiful, painterly transitions and shots that look like galaxies made out of cellular structures, director Fausto Becatti of Bioscope Films has created a new visual language to talk about glass. The short shows the development of glass and beer (the two pieces of Perfectly Made for Each Other) but only obliquely, with shots of grains of sand and fire, wheat and rushing water. The microscopic view is fascinating and compelling, drawing you into familiar shapes and forms before revealing the mechanical production. 

So much of this ad is seamless, and in fact, 95 percent of the shots were filmed in-camera, with only two CGI constructions making it into the final cut. Creating these sci-fi inspired images was achieved with specialist rigs, macro lenses, and alchemical science. The microscopic imagery was taken at Wits University, and using specialized glass lenses to capture the idea of glass is cleverly ironic.