McVities 100 – Advertising Shoot

TBWA commissioned us to shoot a stills and motion Campaign to celebrate the centenary of the McVitie’s Chocolate Digestive.

The project involved a serious amount of modelmaking, and clever engineering solutions for the motion elements.

The biscuit itself was model made by Paul Baker, who is the go-to person for this sort of project. He also constructed the plinth that the biscuit would sit on.

Paul Jordon and Marc Owens were the creatives on the project, and the overriding aim was to treat the biscuit as an icon, literally put on a pedestal.

For the main stills Key Visual it was a case of getting a dramatic POV combined with a dramatic lighting approach, whilst retaining the texture and appeal of the chocolate and biscuit.

The motion version introduced several additional challenges. The look and feel were

driven by what we’d set up for the stills. However, for the motion the biscuit would spin on the plinth, with the camera slowly panning around the plinth.

The rotation of the biscuit needed to increase and decrease in very specific ways, so that for the final frame it ended up in the hero position, as it slows to a halt there would be flash of spotlight creating a lens flare.

With, quite literally, so many moving elements we got a specific rig produced by Jack at Almost Everything, which had a double turntable to rotate the plinth and biscuit at different speeds. Then using programming to synch the light flash with the movement of the biscuit.

It was a complex solution to a tricky set of requirements but worked perfectly thanks to a very talented and dedicated set of crafts people.

Seeing the finished ad lit up on a huge screen in Piccadilly Circus was a fantastic result!