Castle Milk Stout Film Uses 300 Photographs and Hybrid Score to Contrast Rush and Calm

The campaign's hero film, directed by Zee Ntuli with photography by Ross Garrett and produced by Darling Films, is a standout piece of craft. Not craft for craft’s sake, but to create emotion and meaning. Rather than conventional footage, the film is constructed from over 300 individual photographs, edited to capture the franticness of modern life and juxtapose it against the calm hiding in the moments that usually pass us by.

The score does the same work in sound. Rigid Western strings, representing a borrowed relationship with time, were recorded, then bent and distorted, before giving way to the loose, traditional rhythm of the Ngoni and an ensemble of African instruments. One played to the clock. The other to the heart. The result is a film in which photography, edit and score all carry the same idea in lockstep.

Martin Schlumpf, ECD at Joe Public explains, "True to Castle Milk Stout's purpose of helping South Africans savour their richness, every element of the work, from the photography to the final note of the score, had to embody that single truth."

The thinking extends with rigour across the line. Out of Home was placed deliberately in the country's highest-traffic spaces, highways, taxi ranks and station concourses; meeting audiences in the exact moment of the rush. Radio asked how a story this rich could fit into thirty seconds. It couldn't, so each spot was cut off mid-story and completed on Spotify. And on social, striking animated films paired with a compelling voice laid bare exactly how much time the feed steals from us; turning the medium against itself.

Across every channel, a single idea is expressed in the way only that channel can; a level of craft and integration that marks This is African Time as one of Joe Public's most ambitious pieces of work to date.

This is African Time. Right on time.

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