Amstel lager

West Side Story

Joop Geesink could quickly catch on to new trends in film. Shortly beforehand, the dance film/musical West Side Story (1961) was showing in many cinemas. And what do you do then? Right! You make beer bottles dance and move in a similar setting and atmosphere. This film is just one in a series of many in which Geesink made products come to life.

Trivia

Within the studio, a different genre name was assigned for this type of film: stop motion, to distinguish it from puppet animation, which was thus called ‘animation’. The literal translation of ‘stop motion’ is: bringing movement to a halt. The translation of ‘animation’ is: bringing it to life. Within the studio, staff gave puppet animation a higher rating than stop motion.  

Realise that today such a production is made on the computer and computer effects are used to enlarge and reduce the bottles. Here, the vials are placed and shifted in real sets. An ingenious combination of two- and three-dimensional objects and photographs. This work became an independent speciality because of the many technical skills and often self-developed tricks to achieve the desired effect. In the process, craftsmanship came into its own because you could never see in advance how the final result would be until the film was shot and developed in the film laboratory. After all, video assistants or computers did not exist. Everything was shot analogue. Within this film, we conveniently worked with pre-animated vials, which were then printed and cut out. These could be shot on a background with a drawn perspective. This offered the possibility, for example, of bottles tumbling or flying away. Other shots were shot in a real set. 
It is therefore unfortunate that no credits have survived from productions like this one.
Happily, it is not known who was the composer of this good look-a-like sound.