Every now and then an event comes along that is truly unmissable. This is one of them. SomeOne have worked with the Australian Museum to bring their biggest, most exclusive blockbuster exhibition to life in a glittering through-the-line campaign that celebrates the magic of the Golden Age of Egypt.
Ramses & The Gold of The Pharaohs is the world’s most valuable touring exhibition that will visit just 10 locations globally. Once finished the objects on display will never leave Egypt again. It literally is a once-in-a-lifetime exhibition.
The Australian Museum are the only location in the Southern Hemisphere to host the exhibit. Making our challenge not only to attract inter & intra-state visitors, but to draw in crowds from across ANZ and Asia too. In fact, the brief was to make it so compelling that anybody with feet on the ground in Sydney HAS to see it.
AM was keen to really capture the magnificence of Ramses II’s legacy: one that glitters through history thanks to his love for, you guessed it, gold. Known as Ramses ‘The Great’, he was the most celebrated and powerful Pharaoh of the New Kingdom; fittingly referred to as Egypt’s ‘Golden Age’.
In essence, the brief was incredibly clear: ‘Make it shine’.
It’s hard to fathom sometimes just how long humans have been crafting things. And while Egypt may not be home to the world’s very first people, their impact on our advancement is massive. The pieces in the exhibit are millenia old. No price can be put on their value.
For us it was instrumental to centre the campaign around the objects themselves, paying them respect rather than to develop a movie-like narrative around the story of Ramses. (That’s a job for Hollywood).
When you’re given the opportunity to showcase such precious, powerful, and historically significant treasures, the last thing you want to do is to mess with them. They already speak volumes. We simply enabled them to shine even brighter.
Inspired by sands of time, and a spiritual take on Ramses himself the campaign bursts to life in swirls of glittering gold-dust that uncover and amplify the ancient relics of his reign.
In collaboration with retoucher Dave Mercer we worked into the photography of key objects to bring out every detail. From stress fractures and weather marks to the intricate gold-leaf texturing that covers the funerary mask of King Amenemope. The goal was to ‘amplify the truth’. To make the masks look so captivating you can’t help but be compelled to want to see them in the flesh (so to speak).
Never Sit Still developed an organic motion system for the gold-dust to further elevate the magnificence of the objects, in a mesmerising film sequence used to launch the exhibition to the public.
The gold-dust particles becomes a rich language for typographic & object reveals across the campaign. Acting as a vehicle for bringing these priceless treasures to the museum, as if carried across the desert in a swirl of golden magic.
Sometimes clever solutions are the right ones, other times simplicity is king. Making the exhibition glitter might feel like an obvious move (because it is), so we decided to really lean into it. This is the first time these objects have been shown so immaculately, in hyper-real detail.
The campaign lives digitally, in films, large format print, on radio and even projected onto the side of the museum — making it shine at night.
Thanks, as always, to the AM team: Christine Bradburn, Juliet Brereton & Lucy Elliott
SomeOne team: Julien Bertouille, Rebecca Bosustow, Tom Dabner, Michelle Jin
Partners: Dave Mercer, Retoucher. Never Sit Still, Motion. Mark Kilroy, HTML Developer.