Search form

Parisian Effects House Macguff Ligne Completes Jello Spots

MacGuff Ligne Paris transformed Kraft's Jello gelatin and pudding products into a fantasy of pastoral landscapes for a new series of Foote Cone Belding spots. The ad agency chose MacGuff Ligne, thanks in part to its collaborative history with director Jean Pierre Roux and his renowned spot for Evian featuring a baby ballet of synchronized swimming infants. "MacGuff was uniquely suited to make that magic happen due to our flexibility, says executive producer Nico Trout. Speaking about Trukor and Symbor, MacGuff Ligne's 2D and 3D proprietary software packages, Trout explained, We can experiment, make changes and shuffle around details as we go, and discover certain restraints inherent in shooting a particular product. This post-production flexibility may not have been possible in a structure where they're using mostly off-the-shelf software." According to Trout, most other effects houses have a 3D department, a 2D department and a Flame artist, and they're locked into a very stringent post-production process. MacGuff has more control of the rendering and production line. Particularly challenging was the spot called Pudding Skater. Some of the elements were on the set, some were blue screen, some were oversized Jello elements and all of them were of different sizes and scale. The key was to shoot as many of the elements as possible and then assemble them in post. A sequence in the spot, in which the viewer is invited to luxuriate in creamy rippling ribbons of pudding, presented another creative challenge. MacGuff chose to shoot close-up sequences of the pudding product using a high-speed digital camera at 350 frames-per-second. "We shot it with BFC, a Brussels company that specializes in high speed digital recording equipment," explains Trout. "With a disc recorder we could see the results immediately. This was absolutely necessary on this shoot because we didn't have the luxury of time to go from negative to positive prints to see what we were getting."