Framestore contributes visual effects for a stunning new holiday campaign for Barclaycard.
Choosing the right gift is never easy, but, as this stunning new campaign for Barclaycard’s contactless payment service shows you, paying with Barclaycard is. It’s the product of a year-long collaboration between director Chris Palmer (Gorgeous Enterprises), BBH creative directors Matt Doman and Ian Heartfield, agency creatives Tom Drew and Uche Ezugwu, Passion Pictures, and Framestore’s commercial team including Tom Sparks. It's quite a list, but the complexity of the job is clear to see.
It begins with a confused dad, daunted by the prospect of choosing a toy for his son from a busy toy shop. That is until he meets a talking monkey called Mr B, who leads him through a world of living, highly competitive toys. From “little hairy bears” to flirtatious dolls, he is guided through a post production landscape of shot multilayered elements, including green screen live action, wind-up toys, puppeteered dolls, bears, pandas, remote-control cars, helicopters, transformers, and much, much more.
Edited by Johnnie Scarlett, the Flame team, led by Jonathan Hairman, composited layer upon layer of elements, carefully composing each shot. Once this was achieved, we then set about the task of making Mr B talk. Using a second puppeteered head and a crafted script, Mr B’s new head was tracked, relit and fine-tuned into each shot to bring him to life.
Every viewing of the film will reveal another level of the huge detail all parties went to, each eye and mouth movement (even on out of focus characters in the background) has all been animated, and timed to frame accuracy. The project was a huge undertaking and involved a vast team of compositors, trackers and producers, but the results – all three 90, 60 and 40 second versions – are fantastic and well worth the hard work.
Source: Framestore
