Sainsbury’s Great British Food

Dir/Design: Frater Production: Partizan Lab Agency: AMV BBDO

During 2007 we designed and directed a whole campaign of adverts for Sainsbury’s – seven to be precise. We used a mixture of techniques, stop-motion, CG, 2D, whilst a dollop of live action kicked off and summarised each ad (directed by Partizan’s Patrik Bergh). The main thing we had to keep in mind: it was all about the food. Still, we hope we managed to get some good animation design in there too; fire breathing welsh dragons, prancing chef hats, udder-heavy milk cows, to name but a few. Some of it didn’t make the final cut however… ah, the tea-cup knights, what could have been.

To win the campaign we first had to prove ourselves with this test film to show we could successfully integrate food photography into an animated setting. There were lots of small hand-crafted elements such as bees and sunflowers which we made then animated in a tabletop bluescreen setup. We took the resulting movies and comped them together with a CG landscape, pulling everything together in After Effects – not forgetting Dougal our live-action farmer.

This is the final test movie:

[quicktime width=”400″ height=”250″]http://www.fraterfilms.com/fraterblog/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/sainsburys_testfilm.mov[/quicktime]

Here are a couple of WIP movies from the stop-motion shoot we did for “Great British Food”. We got Chris Ketchell in to do the stop-motion for the real campaign. He’s pretty nifty with a welsh dragon:

[quicktime width=”400″ height=”280″]http://www.fraterfilms.com/fraterblog/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/dragonstopmo.mov[/quicktime]

Stop-motion animator Chris Ketchell works the floor

[quicktime width=”400″ height=”250″]http://www.fraterfilms.com/fraterblog/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/flames.mov[/quicktime]

Tissue paper flambé a la Ketchell