2014 Winners & Shortlists

Brief Explanation

Ramadan is a month that used to bring families/people closer together. But with the rise of technology, people have actually gotten further apart. The spirit of Ramadan that brought everyone closer was lost; here our brand embraced a challenge… We wanted to make today's generation feel the true essence of Ramadan, in hope to unite them under one motive: BRINGING BACK TODAY THE RAMADAN SPIRIT OF YESTERDAY. We decided to use the same thing that took people apart to get them back together…. Technology! Using the latest CGI face replacement technique, we recreated legendary Ramadan entertainers to revisit Ramadan in 2013! We brought back the two original Boogie and TamTam puppets, Nelly the Queen of all Riddles, Fatoota, and the biggest surprise of all was Uncle Fouad the Godfather of all Arab comedians deceased 2006. To complement our film, we covered the country with imagery of these Ramadan stars. Our followers further engaged with the celebrities online (www.yallaramdanmasr.com), on-ground and through TV daily-riddles for a charitable cause of bringing joy to orphaned children. Our message reached everyone, everywhere. This marks our most successful Ramadan campaign.

Creative Execution

With an estimated budget of over 25 million Egyptian Pounds, our ad took over three months of production. We had to secure a post-production house before proceeding with the project to know if it was doable or not. Finally, the production comapnyt confirmed that they could pull it off within the tight time frame. We then filmed the Fouad El Mohandes scenes first and then proceeded with the rest of the filming. The reason for that being is, Ghost needed as much time as possible to work on re-creating the actor’s face using state-of-the-art face replacement technology. So while the post-house were creating the visual and special effects, we were simultaneously filming our ad. The film was shot in Cairo. During the day it was 40 degrees and incredibly hot, but luckily we were shooting night shoots and it was bearable by 4:00pm. The lantern scene was shot in the Citadel, which is on top of a hill in Cairo. We wanted to use a real location for this scene. Although we were in a corridor of bookshelves, we wanted it to feel like it belongs to the Islamic past, and there was a hint of Islamic architecture within the shot. A total of 850 lanterns were used during filming each with its own nametag. For purely practical reasons, the ending was shot at the Media City: a huge studio complex outside of Cairo. We shot there because it would have been impossible to take over a real town square and film all night, especially Nelly being lowered into the middle of a town square on a moon in a real location. The amount of people will be upsetting and disturbing, so we dressed this town square not to be recognizable as Media City. The look and the feel of the film are quite unique. We wanted to keep it grounded in the real world. So when we started the film, the colors were a bit muted, with no real bright primary colors. Then, as the hero goes through his journey of enlightenment, we become more colorful. In fact, at the point where Nelly comes in, she actually enters through this big bright moon bringing light into our hero’s world. At that point, we introduce all these colorful lens flares. We were playing over the top with red, blue and yellow flares to create almost like a Pepsi light.