Stormy Studio were commissioned by Weatherhead to create a unique and engaging TV Advert Production to use at the heart of their new website design.
TV Advert Production – Pre Production…
Our Creative Director Jon Draper came up with a number of creatives for the tv advert production client at the first meeting. We then developed the chosen narrative further, creating hand drawn storyboards, moods boards and animatics. With the excellent camera, lens and grading selection we were able to acheive the rich cinematic feel seen throughout. The footage was then raised further with our hand drawn animated elements overlayed, rotoscoped and motion tracked in to the scenes.
One of the quick storyboard stills.
Illustrating the stills used in the storyboard and animatic
Making the most of a great creative…
An awful lot was learnt on the TV Advert Production. We wanted ot ensure the final result was of great quality whilst making the most of the given budget. With the shop being built over a number of nights in a garage using materials mostly borrowed from an old broken up chicken run. The filming took place over 3 days spread out over a month. The opening house shots were filmed a month before the rest as we waited for the Blue Bells to arrive in the woodland.
Young Dexter gets the shoot underway… “Action!!”
Thinking differntly about a shot list…
Most of the TV Advert Production filmed sequences were then shot in reverse order. This allowed us to film the finale shot in the woods first with our own cinema grade camera jib. We then slowly deconstructed the shop inline with the shots in our pre-planned animatic and storyboard. This ensured we had the most complex finale shots in the bag before moving on.
Capturing the final shots in the woods with the EZFX camera Jib.
Young Phoebe painting the shop sign on a mossy old tree trunk. The vintage paint tins were sourced from ebay.
Our young starlet heaves the shop upright. (Helped by our produciton assistant out of shot).
“I don’t like balloons”…
Many surprising hurdles presented themselves during the shoot. At one point the shop rolled backwards down the hill squashing a few bluebells as it went. Plus the young boy in the video was scared of balloons due to some prior experience with one floating away outside a Pizza Hut.
Stunning shot with our young actor standing perfectly for this emotive sequence.
Lenses & Kit…
We filmed the TV Advert Production using our own film kit. Including the excellent Black Magic Cinema Camera, Metabones Speedbooster, Sigma 18-35mm lens, vintage Nikon 25mm and a Tokina 11-25mm lens.
The TV Advert Production was edited back in the studio usingt Adobe Premiere with the grading acheived with Lumetri which had a fantastic update in 2016.
A still showing the moton tracking data overlayed on the footage.
Here we see the hand drawn animated layers overlayed on the filmed TV advert production footage.
We then worked with the excellent web design team at Elixel as they build up a new site making use of various illustrations created during the videos production.
The opening shot which worked perfectly with great light, framing, acting and view.
We hope to put together a longer case study for this TV Advert Production as it touched on so many areas of our own skills in film and animation production.