When Mekanism approached us with a brief to create a visual journey into the world of Ben & Jerry’s Cookie Dough ice cream, we were delighted to work on a grassroots brand that went global yet stayed true to their beliefs. Not to mention, we never heard of anyone not liking ice cream!

For a 30-second TV commercial, we created a journey that would take us from a spoonful of ice cream into the world of Ben & Jerry’s iconic cow, “Woody”, while we showcased the brand’s loud and proud support for fair trade, ethical practices and unmodified ingredients from around the world.

Pre-planning and using intelligent creative solutions enabled us to produce this quirky and fun animation, while meeting the fast deadline to air on French TV early this Summer. The transition from the live action to the animated world was the most challenging aspect of the spot. The client referred to this as the “money shot.” Careful planning was needed to make sure we captured the appropriate movement for our transition. By pre-visualizing the spot, we were able to lock down timings and lay out a guide before we shot the live action scenes and progressed to animation.

By shooting all elements in one day, we were able to capture the intro & outro live action scenes with our female talent, as well as the spoon and the ice cream. For all other ingredients – the cream, vanilla and chocolate – we opted for photo real stock imagery.

A shift in the creative direction forced us with a huge challenge during production. We had to change the look of the ice cream to better suite the brand guidelines. We tackled this hurdle by using a combination of tracking techniques and 3D projection mapping to seamlessly composite a new ice cream look over our shot live action footage.

Within the confines of a tight budget, we applied several intelligent solutions to produce content with high production value. We used our 3D rendered environment and props to build complex scenes in a 2D animation package. This gave us the flexibility to meet the tight deadline, while giving the spot multiple dimensions.

We did a considerable amount of compositing for the intro and outro scenes. This included keying hand holding the ice cream, compositing over stock background plates and adding effects. Handling the production from concept to finish, we completed editing in Adobe Premiere and color correction and treatment in After Effects.