Cereal Partners
Golden Square has just teamed up with McCanns and The Sweet Shop to produce a fun spot for the Nestle brand of cereals that cleverly integrates quirky live action performances with some tastily realistic cgi cereals.
Director, Jeff Wood from The Sweet Shop wanted extreme close-ups of the cereal falling through the air in super slow motion in order to read the words ‘Whole Grain Guaranteed’ on the labels. While it may have been possible to shoot model cereals with little labels at high speed, it was decided that a 3d animated approach gave far more control, not just over legibility, but also making a perfectly performing cereal at any speed. A combination of compositing in both Nuke and Flame enabled flexibility with this project with the CG cereals composited in Nuke in StudioSq, Golden Square’s new department.
The live action performances from actors representing various members of the family were shot on the Arri D2 camera and the close up pouring cereal was shot at high speed using the Photron. Golden Square re-created pouring cereal using particles in Flame, this enabled the cereal to appear at the right moment in the edit.
A magnifying glass, shot on green screen, was used to reveal the CG tumbling cereal, and these sequences were put together in Nuke, where lens effects were added and the various 3d render passes composited and graded.
Rod Norman, Head of Golden Square’s brand new StudioSq comments, “With Nuke’s user friendly interface for multi-pass compositing, we were able to integrate various tasty cereals into the slow mo footage. It was a perfect job for the Studio to play its first significant part in the post production process, and has definitely given us an appetite for more!".