Metal boxes for a body, a compost bin for a lens hood and a cement mixer to drive the film: HeimatTBWA's Verses of Meaningful Madness proves a DIY store's claim by building a cinema camera from its shelves.
The German DIY chain Hornbach has built a working 35mm film camera out of things you can buy in its stores, and then shot its new adverts on it. The body is metal utility boxes, the lens hood is a cut-open compost bin, the film is driven by a cement mixer, and the whole thing is the size of a small van.
The campaign, Verses of Meaningful Madness, is by HeimatTBWA in Berlin, with the directing collective Glue Society and the production companies Tony Petersen Film and Revolver. Research began in early 2025 to prove a camera could be built from Hornbach’s shelves at all. Five young makers from across Europe, with skills from carpentry to metalwork to photography, then built it in seven days at the Colentina store in Bucharest, as Creative Review reported. Transport wheels, water pipes and magnifying glasses supply the moving parts.
Guido Heffels, Hornbach’s chief creative officer, said the idea had been in the team’s heads for about ten years and took another eighteen months to realise.
Deliberately terrible, in the best way. The first spot follows a man rowing across a sea of tall grass, pursued by a dorsal fin, in footage that is grainy and barely in focus until the final shot reveals the crew and their contraption. The second has a human-sized egg chased by a chicken, chased by a rooster, chased by a chef, chased by a pile of grass, all in ten seconds. A ten-minute documentary, Always Think Too Big, covers the build, and the makers each shot a short for a Hornbach 5 Minute Film Festival.
Hornbach has spent two decades being the strangest advertiser in European retail, and it works because the strangeness always proves the proposition. A DIY store that says anything is possible with its products, and then builds a functioning cinema camera from them, has demonstrated the claim rather than asserted it. That is the same logic as Honda’s Cog, and the same reason Dyson’s product-demo advertising lands harder than most brand films.
It also arrives as analogue film enjoys a revival, which makes a cement-mixer camera feel less like a gag and more like a love letter. British DIY advertising, all price points and bank holiday weekends, could stand to think this big once in a while.
He plans, buys and reviews advertising for a living, and helps score campaigns on the site against the same five Crown Score criteria alongside other authors and contributors.
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