Bancolombia with BBDO: Building a Campaign Inside the Brand Colours

Six constructed sets for Bancolombia and BBDO, every one of them painted, dressed and lit in nothing but the brand's blue and yellow - a goalkeeper, a paper-cut park, a birthday table and a Christmas living room.

Bancolombia is blue and yellow. Not mostly blue and yellow - entirely. BBDO's proposition for this campaign was to take that literally and build every scene so that no third colour was allowed anywhere in the frame.

It sounds like a constraint that would flatten everything. In practice it is the most fun I have had on a bank job.

You cannot grade your way into this

The important thing about these images is that almost none of it is post. The walls were painted. The sofa, the cushions, the pendant lamps, the balloons, the bunting, the goalkeeper's kit, the knitwear at Christmas - all sourced or made in two colours.

You can push an image towards a duotone in a grade, but it always shows, because real objects reflect light onto each other and fake ones do not. A blue wall bounces blue into the shadow side of a face. A yellow bench throws warm light up under a chin. That interaction is what sells it, and it only exists if the colour is actually there in the room.

Six worlds, one rulebook

The range inside the constraint is what makes it a campaign rather than an exercise. There is a domestic scene, a sports scene with a goalkeeper fully airborne, a kitchen, a stylised outdoor park made from cut paper, a birthday and a Christmas.

The paper park is my favourite. Rather than shoot a real park and try to force it into two colours, the set team built trees, a bicycle silhouette and a street lamp out of layered blue card, and we lit it hard enough to keep the paper edges crisp. It is honest about being artificial, which paradoxically makes it more charming than a bad composite would be.

“You can grade towards two colours. You cannot fake the way a yellow bench throws light up under somebody's chin.”

Lighting inside a colour cast

Technically the challenge is skin. Put a person in a room where every surface is saturated blue and their face turns to something unusable very fast.

The fix is a tightly controlled neutral key with heavy flagging, so the face gets clean light while the room stays fully in the palette. Every frame here has more flags and negative fill than lights. Blocking colour off a face is most of the job.

I had shot for the same bank before in a completely different register - the Getty library work, which had to stay neutral enough to license anywhere. Same client, opposite brief. The blue and yellow version is the one people remember.