Rowntrees- The Smile Factory
So the work began in Jan 2016 and after a long ol’ wait, it finally came out of research. Major Briggs and I then began working with the Blink Ink team to bring this baby to life!
Above are two development sketches of the interiors within the jelly tot and the fruit pastille factory. The jelly tot was a slight issue when it came out of research as 1.People didn’t quite understand that this factory was meant to be tiny compared to all the others and 2. The lasers seemed a bit intoxicating and inappropriate (I personally loved the sci-fi vibe but it wasn’t quite right) So I tried out a few different options to present to the client, involving a giant magnifying glass and some squashing arm mechanisms, which in the end is the design they went for.
The characters within this jelly tot factory needed to look confined but comfortable so we threw in a couple of armchairs and levers to help the little guys out. These renders show the factories in full CG which I was completely psyched to see but they still lacked some of that 1950s texture and charm we were looking for.
Our producer Janet Smith then installed the help of matte painting wizard Mike Shorten to directly paint over the black and white 3D render in Photoshop. When these versions came back, we couldn’t believe our luck, genius! The first one on the top left was a Frank Soltesz inspired paint over but we wanted to keep the colours nice and bright to suit both the Rowntrees branding and my own work, so we commissioned Mike to do a full paint over using my original sketched colour references.
There was also a request from the agency to make the characters appear more realistic, this was difficult for me to do personally and detach myself from my own working process so Mike also worked up a few shaded versions of my characters for the agency to see.
The difficult task then for the 2D animation team was to work out how to animate the fully shaded character versions. Joe Sparrow worked on these brilliant step by step instructions for animators to use that involved three layers to every frame; colour, shadow and highlights. These layers were then overlaid, slightly blurred and softened in comp to embed them into their environment.
Rather than creating the exterior of the sweet in CG Major Briggs, Blinkink and I decided that it would be amazing to drop the 3D interior into an actual sweet so that it would have a slight stop motion feel and still remain tactile. However we found that actual Rowntrees sweets just melted under the studio lighting so we enlisted the help of a model maker to build giant versions of all three sweets... awesome! The doors of the sweets were then shot opening and closing at Clapham Road studios with director of photography Toby Howell on a big beast of a camera.
These are the final results - a mixture of 2D illustration/animation, model making, 3D rendering, matte painting, 100s of emails, 2 brain melts, many meetings, 20 headaches and a thousand high fives. Thanks team, it was a joy to be a part of and if you look closely I even managed to sneak in a tiny award of excellence or (bad) health and safety onto the wall of the Jelly tot factory to act as a little pat on the back to us all :)
Click here to see the finished advert with all the credits.
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