I always find it kind of funny the way things come together. Like the whole Campbell Brothers' thing, it's a joke of 21 years' duration now. Wow, that blows me away. And every year it's interesting on how all the little stuff comes together.
If you're reading this then you're probably familiar with our modus operandi. About a month before Christmas we make two batches of wine (and by 'we' I really mean my brother Ralph, he's been doing it for years now, but I'm feeling royal or something): a red one and a white one. We, and here I mean me, then make the labels for each of the batches. We often like to add something as a handout, like the brochure, to tell a story about the Campbell brothers (and now son).
Okay, while I ramble on a bit, let me insert here the wine label we came up with for the red wine.
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| The Rubber Chicken Band |
I think the themes for the labels came easily this year. We didn't even fight. At least no one was bruised or bleeding after the decision making process was completed. Some years it's been a lot harder coming up with this stuff. We agreed on the themes and then had to source costumes and props. We jumped on our collective horse and rode off in all directions.
Then, a week or so before we needed the labels, we got together for a weekend at my place. We hung a sheet up against a wall and took turns photographing each other. It's not very professional, believe me.
For the red wine label Ralph managed to borrow a nice cowboy hat to wear and I dug through some stuff I've been carting around for years and found a couple of other hats. One is a bent up old felt hat left over from a trip I did years ago, and my son Elliot is wearing a bowler I've had for a number of years as well.
The instruments used for the shot were easy to get. I have a number of musical instruments, some that just hang from my wall as decoration (they're not really playable). Elliot in this picture is holding his own acoustic, by far a better guitar than the combination of instruments Ralph and I are holding.
Sadly - and we did look - we couldn't find a rubber chicken the right size, I had to use an image I downloaded from the net. I also downloaded a couple of images for backgrounds to set the body shots against. As a note here we are not a commercial enterprise, we don't make any money from doing this, so I borrowed background images that hopefully fit the theme.
Here's the white wine front label.
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| Clinical Trial |
O.K. For the white wine label, again sadly, we couldn't find a lab coat. I ended up rummaging in my closet and coming up with an old white shirt, part of the uniform I wore for a bus company I used to drive for, that we made perform double duty, as a lab coats for each of us.
I had also gone to the dollar store and blew a couple of dollars on a toy doctor's kit, basically a toy stethoscope and a piece of printed cardboard. We stuffed those in Ralph's pockets.
While we were goofing around doing the photographs I thought it might be cool to have a nurse's hat. I went on line again, found a hat template, downloaded and printed it, then hand painted in the red cross. Still it works, kinda.
Oh, take a closer look at Ralph's head. The headband is actually masking tape wrapped around his noggin' and the fake doctor disk sort of thing (I don't know what it's actually called) is actually a DVD from one of Elliot's game systems also taped to Ralph's head.
We have no pride.
On the back of each bottle of white wine we put another label with the following message.
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| Campbell Brothers Clinical Trial |
and no, I'm not helping you read the small print. I ran out of things to say anyway. I would have loved to have maybe 2 more lines.
Once 'principal photography' was done I got to work on the computer, cutting out each image and assembling the elements into the labels and, again this year, produced a brochure with the story lines we had talked about. Usually, because I work, this takes about a week.
Here's the brochure's front spread.
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| Brochure - front spread |
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| Brochure - inside spread |
So then we headed over to Ralph's place to do the bottling which Elliot was good enough to assist us with (he's the official corker). And after the bottling we moved upstairs to his kitchen table, sampled a little more of the wine, and put on all the labels. I had already printed and folded all the brochures so we split up the wine and the brochures and then Elliot and I carted the spoils off home.
Just so you're in on another joke, the guitar the rubber chicken is holding is actually my new guitar, a Fender resonator. I'm learning, after all these years of plucking on strings, to finally play guitar, and I'm learning to play slide (blues style). Another tidbit, Dobro is a trademarked name for a company now owned by Gibson.
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| Rubber chicken and the Fender. |
So now we each have about a case of each wine, labeled, and ready to throw. I mean to gift to an unsuspecting populace.
And that's about it. Hope you enjoyed the posting.
