They wanted to create a wow factor – they wanted to steal the show. They wanted some spark of magic that would make everyone stop, look, and be impressed; and to do it all with an elaborate panache, an elegance, a cultured flamboyance appropriate to the finest of celebratory champagnes and one of the great film festivals. They wanted to arrive in style.
Enter the Moet & Chandon taxi: a celebration of London and light.
The craft and the graft that went into dressing our taxi up for the ball – as well as the high-impact arrival at the Film Festival Premiere
Our story begins on a cold wintry morning and passes a lot of sheep before circling back round to the red carpets of Leicester Square. Assembling a creative team of writers, photographers and designers, we set off for the North of England in search of a man whom we knew was experimenting with a new technology: electro-luminescence (EL). EL creates the most beautiful effects by running electric current through specially-treated pads to make them light up: essentially, paper that glows.
The design map showing the Swarovski crystal “Moet” badge and bubbles.
Placing each EL pad in position.
Our motley but talented crew included the man who ran the Eurofighter production flight line – and whom also happened to be one of only eight people in the UK who could write midi (music computer code) to drive fairground organs, which was the more pertinent skill on this expedition. It was his genius with the code that mastered the complex sequencing of the electro-luminescent panels and co-ordinating this with a musical score, turning the Moet taxi from a lightshow into an eye-catching, ear-catching experience.
Lightshows are impressive, but lights aren’t a girl’s best friend. So to increase the aesthetic appeal of the taxi still further, we teamed up with Swarovski to illustrate the entire bodywork with an elaborate pattern of 200,000 crystals, stuck on carefully by hand to create the Moet bottle and bubbles – half the village of turned out to help. The result was this brilliant, bubbling, paparazzi-stopping carriage that delivered a little bygone elegance, modernised for the 21st century, to the luminaries of Leicester Square.
