Ogilvy was looking at a variety of animation/design and live action houses. The concept was in place but the specifics were still open. They had been through a number of houses and then we came into the mix. Stefan Woronko took a stab at presenting a statistic and bringing his inimitable magic to it. The creative team responded really well, but wanted to make sure that food was the star of the piece. We decided to work with director Steve Gordon, at Sons and Daughters, to create something that was part table top, part graphics and part documentary.
Philosophie
We all found the statistics pretty eye-opening. I think everyone involved changed the way we buy our food. Challenges early on were the levels of legal approval the team at Unilever and Ogilvy had to go through on all the stats. Everyone wanted to make sure that the information was fair and irrefutable. All the food in the shoot was Canadian, which is no small challenge in spring.
Problem
We have done other interactive pieces, but this was far and away the biggest single project. For a start, its nearly 3 minutes long, involved a 20-hour shoot with 2 sets of stop frame animation, a month of CG pre viz where we literally built every shot in CG ahead of time so that everyone could be a part of the process. The schedule had a really tight finishing schedule so we really needed to have all the nuts and bolts worked out before the shoot.