TOTAL FAKERS
You say that like it's a bad thing. But for Schein Berlin, designing fake products for TV and film is very, very good.
Picture the supermarket checkout belt, spilling over with its bright cornucopia: a postmodern Dutch still life. A herd of verdant canned vegetables is flanked by a squat box of Altril, that trusty laundry detergent for Hans and Gretel, and this week’s ALEXA magazine, whose cover asks searchingly: “White Jeans: Which Ones Don’t Make You Look Fat?” A bottle of Glenwood single malt arches in the background, envy and privilege clinging almost palpably to its neck. Those Morphin headache tablets suggest a girl fallen on tough times, but the Safermo condom-pack perks up the scene somewhat. Who is she?
Step back to peek at the shopper, but tread carefully as you do: the cameraman is hard on your heels, and we’re losing daylight.
Welcome to the world inside the boob-tube, as designed by Schein Berlin. Working out of an old nuts-and-bolts factory on Berlin’s scrappy-chic thoroughfare Kastanienallee, the firm started five years ago to exploit a quirk in German media law: it’s verboten to place real products in a TV show or film without explicitly labeling this as paid advertising. (Imagine a Bond film in full compliance, bubbling madly with disclaimers like a VH-1 Pop-Up video.) Enter Schein: they design fake everyday products of all stripes for use in TV shows, films, even video games. (Fittingly, “Schein” means both “appearance” and “fake” in German.) Churning out soap, beer bottles, sex shop signage, law firm stationery, even TV shows within TV shows, the boys at Schein are more than just armchair experts on what makes consumer brands tick. Fall into Schein’s looking-glass world – you may find your own work, reflected back with the tiniest skew and wink.
ENJOY COCOLA!
“Until recently, German TV shows weren’t allowed at all to earn money from product placement,” says Henning Brehm, a graphic designer with close-cropped brown hair and a round, impish face haloed in scruff. He works on Schein projects with fellow designer Jan Hülpüsch and photographer Daniel Porsdorf, plus designs real products under his own agency, Design Tourist. “The idea was to ensure that private companies had no influence over a TV program’s content, outside of the commercials,” Brehm continues. While restrictions have relaxed for private channels, publicly funded TV stations cannot include unmarked advertising within a show’s content – a rule still strictly enforced, as broadcasters ARD and ZDF learned in 2005 after surreptitiously inserting product placements within shows.
“Even as restrictions have loosened, our products are often still more attractive, because [real products] involve all kinds of complicated contracts with the rights holders,” Brehm remarks. “It just slows down an already chaotic, last-minute production schedule.” Not only do “rights-free” products sidestep an increasingly complex set of EU product placement regulations, Brehm cites another unexpected benefit. “Product placement can actually have a negative impact on selling ad time,” he adds. “With Pepsi products as part of the show, Coca-Cola doesn’t buy ads.” For long-running TV shows with re-runs, flexible ad sales tactics are crucial.
Schein’s game depends on instinct, speed and volume. For the German TV show Gute Zeiten, Schlechte Zeiten (In Good Times and Bad), they typically crank out a dozen new products per week – over 500 products so far. “Usually we can figure out most of what we need to design, just from the descriptions of people in the scripts,” Brehm explains. Zip through the script, hit grocery stores and the Internet, bang out some sprightly fakes, run their would-be brand names past the copyright office for conflicts, and poof! A bewildering variety of plausible fakes are born. Then, of course, come the last-minute requests: a beer that teachers might drink after a handball match; a women’s magazine, flipped through distractedly at the dentist’s office, then forgotten. Not only is the work cycle built on speed, the results are similarly fleeting. In an interview with Deutsche Welle, Brehm describes an entire Russian supermarket Schein created for the 2003 fillm The Bourne Supremacy:"We spent half the night taping and stacking cartons, then we watched the film and were really disappointed at the way the camera simply rushed by," Brehm said.
Film work does have its leisurely side: with longer lead times, the Schein team can immerse themselves in researching and creating an integrated look. Their work on the 2006 feature V for Vendetta offers a remarkably comprehensive example. “All the institutions had to be re-designed: the ruling party, police, military, TV stations, newspapers, and the postal service were integrally connected to the story,” Brehm says. “The question was: how would life have developed under these conditions – namely, a dictatorship in Great Britain?” Their zealous interpretation touched posters, TV stations, public transit, even the queen-less currency.
Downfall, the 2005 drama depicting Hitler’s last days in the bunker, pushed Schein into historical territory, researching and reproducing WWII-era brands and props, while stirring a faintly repugnant stew of history at the same time. “Working on Downfall left us with a bitter aftertaste,” Brehm recalls. “The research required visiting a lot of shady websites.” Recreating actual, hateful symbols – unlike the slick comic fantasy-world of V – provides strong proof of the talismanic power of brands, either to invigorate a story with verisimilitude or taint it with a nauseating whiff of the past.
The agency’s most recent projects smudge the lines between reality and art even more merrily: post-WWII street signs and products for 2006’s The Good German; a film adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (complete with collectible treasure cards); and the Berlin-based TV crime series R.I.S., for which Schein will design graphic elements, as well as stage and shoot all crime-scenes.
BRANDS, REALITY, AND THE TINY GAP IN-BETWEEN
Churning through so many sham brands with such speed brings up big-picture questions, like: what makes a brand convincing in the first place? How can brands navigate that narrow space between convention – all the design trappings that reassure us that, yes, this is soda, soap, moisturizer – and the baby-steps into new visual language that make a brand stand out? Brehm reframes the question: “A brand’s power to convince comes chiefly from the marketing budget backing it, the advertisements that hammer that brand into our memories,” he points out. “Naturally we don’t do that with our fake products. Our work is mainly about creating brands that seem authentic, that don’t confuse viewers, but rather just lead them along.”
Then again, no one sinks advertising dollars into a brand that doesn’t itself exert some magic. In their purposeful restraint Schein’s work offers a study in mediocrity, of safe decisions you’d never invest in, versus the calculated, brilliant leap you would. “Oh, we’re harsh critics,” laughs Brehm. “What we’ve really learned [from this work] is there are plenty more real brands that look like fakes than you’d realize!”
So what constitutes the right leap forward, that critical tiny difference? Brehm looks to evolution for clues: “Designs evolve over the years, with limited differences between them and everyone eyeing everyone else,” he avers. “Real revolutions just don’t exist. We realize most brands are the result of patterns consumers have learned over years, which makes it easy to ‘invent anew’ on top of that.” Thinking about brands in evolutionary terms not only helps Schein release fully adaptive brands into the world quickly, it also suggests an object-lesson for designers looking to break out: if you can pinpoint the why’s behind your competitors’ habits in the wild, you can seek out adaptations no one has tried. Most will squawk and fail, dodo-like, but a few will trick your predators and your prey.
Evolution also addresses another question: why have brands even arrived at these peculiar design conventions? Why are detergent designs so futuristic, when the product is not? Why is it largely taboo to use black on food packaging? Like appendices or nipples on men, each design rule started for a real if antiquated reason. Brehm see Jane Jetson behind laundry detergent designs: he points to “a mix of competence and supposedly high-tech inventiveness (‘ultra’, ‘oxi’)…along with sub-categories like fabric softener and woolen detergents, whose bottles played on cliches of the female figure”. Never mind that this is all irrelevant to teenage boys today, pressed into doing laundry by a working mother. Old design rules die hard.
Like pocket-ecologies in evolution, conventions also arise differently based on habitat. Take Germany’s Consumer Product A: beer. “German beers all look very similar: coats-of-arms, specific typefaces, and a defined mix of colors,” Brehm notes. “It’s rare to find a red beer label in Germany, unlike in America. Germans go for green, brown, gold and silver. Right now German manufacturers are copying each other in a new trend: beer doesn’t come in dark bottles anymore but in translucent ones, with names like ‘Gold’, ‘Sun’ or ‘Fresh’. You could easily add ‘Summer’ to that list…” If “Summer” represents the middling solution, a totally clear or frosted bottle, or a wittier name suggesting brightness, zing, or sunburns-and-Frankfurters, might push a new brand into the foreground.
More than anything, Schein’s work points to a home-truth about the “real” brand-world: it’s an imaginary reality we dream up, and then live in, daily. Supermarkets, highway shoulders, and all the screens that beguile our idle moments are wallpapered with our longing. German cultural philosopher Theodor Adorno nailed it best: “In appearance is the promise of what doesn’t appear.” Fakes can telegraph the deepest truths: everything that we long for and cannot find.
—Jude Stewart for PRINT Magazine, July / August 2007
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