Carmen for the ENO

“But look at us now, quit driving, some things hurt more much more than cars and girls.”

Wise words from the sagely Paddy McAloon.

Well there was nothing painful about our sister agency’s recent shoot for ENO’s forthcoming production of Carmen but we couldn’t miss a golden opportunity to use a Prefab Sprout lyric in a blog post.

Last weekend saw the team at our creative agency, Technique, gathered at London’s Hoxton Street Studios to shoot the forthcoming advertising campaign for the ENO’s production of Carmen. The show has a vibrant and sensual 70’s feel about it and so to capture that mood we worked with the brilliant photographer, Jon Day @JonDayPhoto. You’ll see from the some of the ‘behind the scenes’ images that he did a spectacular job of turning a small corner of Liverpool Street into something far steamier.

Working with the stellar Josie Hall @josiexhall from MOT Models as Carmen and a little help from Milton our vintage Mercedes driver what could go wrong ? Reassuringly the answer is very little, bearing in mind the age of the vehicle and the fact that we were shooting on the day of the climax of the RBS 6 Nations rugby final. The only minor fly in the ointment was the arrival of some disctinctly un-Spanish sand.

The correct sand has arrived!

This was swiftly replaced thanks to a sharp black-cab delivery. What down-time we had was briefly filled by posing with the giant wooden bear that guards the studio…

The giant wooden bear!

…and Josie vamping it up across the metalwork of the Merc:

Josie the vamp

So the end result was probably our best piece of work to date for The ENO, but of course we’ll let you be the judge of that:

The final poster (click on it to see a larger image)

We’d like to say final thanks to Sascha, Seema and Emily for make-up, hair and wardrobe but we’ll leave the final word, much like the first to Paddy:

“Something responds deep in our engines, we have all been burned.”

We hope the ENO’s smoldering Carmen does the same for you.