Goldfish Crackers Campaign
Blur Studio | 2009 and 2010
Tv Commercials
Role: Director
In 2008 Blur created a test to show the Y&R agency where they could take their current commercials for the Goldfish Crackers, with more interesting visuals and a more dynamic language that incorporated a "film style" camera work. The test was supervised by me and Dan Rice (lighting and modeling) and created with the help of a couple extra animators and modelers in just one week. I created the layout from scratch, without storyboards, trying to find the right style along the way. It worked, they loved it and we were awarded the 2009 campaign, and later the 2010 as well.
One of the things we did to speed up the creation of the models we needed was to build an environment - the kid's bedroom - almost entirely re-using assets from a short film that we were working on. Unfortunately, the short film was never finished, but at least some of the work put into it was put to good use! Here's a detail of the 80's themed environment, can you spot Blur's inside jokes?
One of the interesting things about the campaign is that it had an ongoing story that spanned across not only the different episodes, but each year's season as well. And unlike what I was expecting based on my previous experiences with Ad agencies, the team they had developing the ads was great to work with. Here's a couple of my favorite episodes, this is episode 7:
And here's episode 8...
One of the spots, "In the Dark" ended up getting nominated for an Annie Award, which is a great honor among animators. It's actually one of my least favorite spots in the series, but the other ones weren't out yet so I guess we couldn't send them to qualify for a nomination.
All the images here are from the 2009 campaign, which I directed. One of the last things I did at Blur was to start working on the 2010 campaign before leaving to work at Pixar. Jeff Fowler, of Gopher Broke fame, took over it and I'm sure he will make those little spots way more entertaining than the previous year!