Darke Studios and Elemental Media worked in tandem for the concept, and with storyboards in hand produced by ourselves, they pitched this to the client. The idea was that the illustrated birds from the bird feed packaging should be living and portrayed within live action scenes. Once the concept was signed off, Elemental and Darke handled the film production side of things. However, on the day of the shoot, Dom and Paula from Brace Media were on set to lend a hand and collect reference materials for the 3D animation.

The project was a challenge, ensuring the birds looked enough like their 2D counterparts while being 3D to bring to life. During the project, goals moved a bit here and there with additional 3D shots requested by Ernest Charles; and shots that were meant to be static (and so were shot against a static greenscreen) were then required to be moving, meaning that suddenly we had to create additional CGI. Things like this did increase the workload but we got through it. Modelling, animation and rendering was handled by our chosen tool, Lightwave 3D.

As the shed interiors were shot with greenscreen behind the window, we also needed to chromakey those shots, and add in season-driven background plates outside the shed.

After rendering in HD, we passed the sequenced back to Elemental Media who were handling the edit and grading on this occasion, who created the final loop-able sequence that would be on show in stores.

Production photos

The Caffeine Partnership in London had already been working with Nissan for a while when they were looking for an affordable team for their DVD authoring and replication requirements.

On this occasion we had to carefully encode the films about the Nissan Qashqai model, plus design and author a working menu to play the elements from. There were language choices (for each of the destinations) and a chapters menu. After this was approved we then moved on to disc replication. This time it was 6,000 DVD5 discs in a slimline jewel case with a double-sided insert.

The bigger challenge lay in the logistics to get the discs on time, with a 3-way split delivery to Sunderland UK, Spain, and Russia. Everything was pretty smooth except for the shipment to Russia which got stuck at Russian Customs for far too long. There was nothing we could do to speed things up there, so we were literally stuck in the hands of Russian officials.

However, aside from this shipment issue, everything else went superbly, and the relevant people were impressed with the finished discs.

The Big Button team handled the concept and the filming elements. It was up to us to create the motion graphics.

It was quite a challenge as the timeline was short. We had to re-create the graphics of popular social media platforms in such as way that we could be as close to them as needed without any loss of graphical fidelity. We also had to match move the opening shot for the burst effect from the mobile phone.

The finished piece came together well telling the story of why you shouldn’t play around at rail tracks. You just don’t know when the power is on, or what it can do to you. What was needed was an approach that the young target audience could identify with – something a bit different that was more likely to encourage a change in their behaviour.

Once uploaded to Network Rail’s Youtube channel, it quickly received hits and comments.
The sequence also won two awards: IVCA and EVCOM Clarion.

A job well done then!