Alright, I hope I get this right, there are a lot of names going on here. Ad agency Mother in conjunction with Stella Artois brings old school advertising online. Then The Ritual Project sponsored by Stella Artois brings the ad to life with a documentary about the process. The Ritual Project describes the project on their website:

“Step by step, a group of painters brought the perfect Stella Artois to life as a 20 x 50 foot stop-frame animation high over the New York City streets. And in the process, they revealed an untold story of tradition, sacrifice, and an industry dangling preciously on the brink of extinction.”

This first video is the project from start to finish, shot in time-lapse.

The Ritual Project – final timelapse from The Ritual Project on Vimeo.

This second video is the documentary about the painters and the dying art of huge mural advertising as vinyl becomes cheaper in rough economic times.

UP THERE from Jon on Vimeo.

The effort put into this campaign should not be overlooked. I don’t live in NYC, so there is no way I would have seen this project taking form other than the documentation of it via “The Ritual Project”. I suppose Stella wanted the project to documented and thus sponsored “Up There”.

While we’re here talking about Stella you may as well check their homepage, where you can win a trip to Cannes. This is the first time I’ve seen a webpage like this ask you to connect to Facebook upon entry. Normally this is something I wouldn’t do before really understanding what I was connecting to, but because I’ve been looking at all these Stella ads I thought I would take a chance. When you get into the site after connecting with Facebook, a video starts showing a bunch of rich people looking for the person who is going to attend Cannes. The cool part is when they start going through photos of people, you see images of your friends, and then they finally end up on a picture of you. They got me at first. I wondered how my friends had been put onto the webpage, then remembered the Facebook connect.

Well played Stella, I’ll cheers to that.