People dreaming of falling through the air or flying in the sky are considered a common occurrence. But most of these dreams are not punctuated with a variety of floating beds or eloquently narrated with Shakespearean lines about sleeping. And it's not often that your dreams turn into an advertisement for a Swedish furniture chain.
However, the latest television commercial from IKEA focuses on the company's beds set in the world of the dreaming. The message about their comfort is brought across by the surreal visuals of different kinds of beds levitating in the sky. And mimicking those fore-mentioned dreams, are people falling away from their beds and plummeting through space.
The beautiful and surreal imagery of the ad is enhanced by the elegant quotation of a soliloquy from Act IV of Shakespeare's play "The Tempest," delivered by protagonist Prospero:
"Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."
The thrilling dream of a commercial depicts a woman making her journey down through the sky and all the strange beds to get home, and to get to the comfortable bed that is hers. This may remind people of the sensation they feel when they finally get home to sleep in their own bed after a long day of work.
The advertisement was directed by Juan Cabral for ad agency Mother London. It is the third commercial in an IKEA campaign called "The Wonderful Everyday." The previous commercial was about a spinning kitchen, and the one before that was focused on a forest filled with LED lighting. While the earlier two ads had a touch of trippiness, none reached the surrealism of this commercial focused on beds. Think of it like a cross between the work of Terrence Malick and David Lynch.
Behind the scene pictures posted at Co.Create show that, surprisingly, few special effects from computers were needed. They use beds suspended from cranes, actors dangling from wires and even a skydiver to capture the necessary trippy images when they filmed the IKEA commercial in Johannesburg, South Africa. Check it out below:
