Golden Square Gets Ready, Steady, Glow for RSA and WCRS
Ready Brek’s instantly recognisable glow has received a 21st century makeover courtesy of WCRS, RSA Films and Golden Square, the latter of whom reinvented the cereal’s iconic glow whilst creating some charmingly childlike 3D elements such as a patchwork horse.
The spot opens on a kid eating Ready Brek and becoming imbued with the cereal’s magical glow. This glow, a metaphor for the product’s nutritional qualities, sets him up for the rest of the commercial by giving him special powers and fuelling his imagination. He can capture flying books in a net made of glow; he can nab a patchwork horse with a glow lasso; and he can take on four defensive table football players by leaping over them from a glow trampoline.
The brief was to update Ready Brek’s iconic glow with charm, warmth and imagination. So the main issue for Golden Square’s 3D team – led by Dave Child – was to correctly interpret the director’s vision on these fantastical elements whilst avoiding a clinical 3D look. In effect, the team had to create a stop-motion look but with all the flexibility of 3D.
The 3D horse was built using a maquette made of fridge magnets as reference. The team played around with boundaries, experimenting with varying degrees of bending and solidity. Once this step had been cracked, various fabric textures were scanned in and applied to each number and Dave then set about working on the horse’s animation, trying to make it as natural as possible.
This horse sequence was tricky to composite. The boy was shot sitting on a colourful numbered blanket which was placed on a green cloth horse with tracking markers. The blanket was originally intended to provide the basis for the entire final horse but once it was decided that the horse should be created entirely in 3D, the boy had to be rotoscoped off the shoot horse and replaced onto the 3D horse. This involved complications such as layering live action both behind and over the 3D.
The football players were again developed from a combination of 2D and 3D. A giant player was modelled and filmed in-situ with a view to it being replicated four times in Flame. But certain shots ended up being created in 3D so as to give more editing options.
The glow itself required a lot of post production attention. Being absolutely crucial to the brand and the campaign, Mat Stevens used After Effects to develop the final design: a modern updating of the much-loved old graphical device that people remember as a kid.
Golden Square 3D artist, Dave Child, said: “When we started pre-production, we knew that there were a lot of creative issues to solve, but fortunately everyone involved was inspired by the director’s vision and pulled in the same direction, which made the post production work incredibly smooth. The production company even created a maquette of the horse for us which streamlined the design process and allowed us to devote more time to finessing animation.”