Curious Film director Ash Bolland fires up global campaign for Burn energy drink via Publicis Italy

Accompanied by Tara Riddell (producer) and Lachlan Milne (Cinematographer), Bolland spent two weeks discovering the grittier side of Buenos Aires. Location scouts secured access to a housing estate in which to shoot an epic short film called ‘Burn | Never Extinguish’, featuring professional European skateboarders Rune Glifberg, Jonas Skroder, Hugo Maillard and Dany Hamard.

Says Bolland: “Professional skaters spend their lives traveling the world, crashing on people’s apartment floors.  It’s a grass roots profession, and I wanted to depict it in an authentic way. There’s something about starting off with a failure that instantly makes it a lot more honest.”

Prior to filming ‘Burn’, Bolland was busy shooting the ‘Green Box Project’ for Becks via Mother London. During the shoot, a team of creatives at Publicis Milan invited him to direct a short film starring Coke-Burn’s skateboard team. They’d just seen Bolland’s short films for ‘Viva’, which won a stack of awards at the German Art Directors Club awards, and felt Bolland, could bring something fresh to the Burn concept.

Bolland began writing a short film about four young skateboarders and the fuel that feeds their drive to “chase it, feed it and make it stronger”.

As a skater, he was adamant that all the tricks had to be achieved for real and in-camera to give the film authenticity. In fact almost everything seen in the film is real: the tricks, the fire, the debris – the tornado is the only thing created in cgi.  

The Burn campaign is all about igniting and fuelling your passion, so Publicis Milan gave Bolland the freedom to create something epic and raw.

“This film is about evoking an emotion of skateboarding and the struggle to do want you really want to do in life. The tornado is a metaphor for life holding you back, instead of just keeping on doing what you want to do. So when Rune throws his skateboard into the tornado in the final shot, it’s a ‘fuck you’ to all the things that get in the way,” says Bolland.

In March 2011, Ash was a finalist at the Shots New Director Award for his ‘Genetically Modified’ campaign for MTV.

Says Bolland: “I love directing and the process; bringing something to life; making something that people have not seen before – something that will make them look at life a little differently. I love the idea of creating work that can affect people on an emotional level. That makes all the hard work worth it.”