DISNEY 52 CLASSICS - HOW A CAMPAIGN OF FOUR COMMERCIALS WAS MORE THAN JUST MICKEY MOUSE

A series of four commercials for cinema, TV and onlinefor the release of all 52 animated Disney classics, one for every week of the year! The initial brief was to capture the innocent wonder and imagination of a child, but with a cheeky, humorous and contemporary feel. We picked up on the popular meme of Mickey Mouse on a post-it note then doing the rounds.

How to translate this to a funny live-action filmed narrative? With a limited budget, and needing to re-create Scandinavia without travelling much beyond the M25, I came up with a mini-series concept. We would have a little girl who would watch and sketch her family in different scenarios around the home. And in particular we wanted to show the warmth and affection that family members - especially as demonstrated here, brother and sister - have for one another!

We played with the idea of her using technology but research into our target audience – or at least their parents! – revealed that the homely, warm simplicity of a hand drawing, of sketching would not only keep the flavour of the original DIY sketch concept, but also evoke a sense of crafting, simplicity and innocence. For once we could draw on the wholesome idea of kids who could be entertained with just a pencil and paper!

We broke down the stories into four genres: Adventure, Princess, Villain and Hero, casting Dad, Older Sister, Younger brother and Mum in the corresponding roles, to be transformed from the ordinariness of everydayderring do – cycling to work or hosing the lawn, into a knight, a firefighter or a pirate. We found a lovely home literally just the other side of the M25, cast some lovely Nordic-looking English actors and commissioned an illustrator to work on set with us to produce our little girl’s cartoon doodles. The transformations were about to begin!

Each story had developed into a little opening narrative to usher in a voice-over-driven montage of animated Disney footage, with a nice pay-off ‘double-take’ narrative action reveal at the end.

So popular was the idea that we instigated an online competition to win a DVD boxed set!

adam rowleyDecember 13, 2015Comment

Mar 21, 2023

HOW MUCH DOES A CORPORATE VIDEO COST?

YOU KNOW WHAT YOU WANT TO SAY AND HOW YOU WANT TO SAY IT, BUT WHAT IS YOUR BUDGET?

How much will my film cost? Is inevitably our first question. The unhelpful answer is of course, how long is a piece of string? You may want a simple one-day, one-man shoot with a quick one-day edit, and you can probably get that for under a grand if you’re not too fussy and it really is just a one-day edit. Or you might want an ambitious creative concept, with lots of pre-production followed by a complex week-long shoot, filming on a RED camera, and lots of complicated compositing and animated graphics. And that could be £20 - £30 000. Or more.

Mar 20, 2023

WHY YOU HIRE A PROFESSIONAL PHOTOGRAPHER

So here’s the cruel irony. Even though I know I possess the kind of staggering youthful good looks that make people catch their breath and drop their falafel when they meet me in real life, on camera I look like a laboratory experiment where the mad scientist has injected the DNA of Brendan Gleason and Charles Manson into a old potato

And being self-conscious - oh my crooked smile, oh my seventy-eight chins - means I forget that my delicious eyes are like limpid emerald pools you could drown in, and I project discomfort - In short, I don’t pose well. Maybe you do. Millions of others dont. And some of them work for you.

Mar 16, 2023

TESTIMONIAL VIDEOS, WHAT ARE THEY GOOD FOR?

WHY THE BEST WAY TO SELL YOUR PEOPLE IS TO USE YOUR PEOPLE

Back in the mists of time, every corporate video had an ambitious narrative, like a storyboarded long-form commercial, a piece of expensive, styled, authored creative in its own right. These films do still get made and they are great. I make them myself, though more usually I work in short form. Is this always how you want to disseminate your information, your brand, your company? Sometimes yes. Just as sometimes you want to Ronseal it, to say it like it is. But do you want to be that blunt? Again probably not.

WHY SPEND MONEY ON A PROFESSIONAL VIDEOGRAPHER?

WHAT VALUE DOES A PROFESSIONAL VIDEOGRAPHER ACTUALLY BRING TO THE PARTY?

Sure so this is where you get sold all the corporate and advertising cliches about brand identity and adding value to your message and blah blah blah. And you may not be thinking in those terms, but rather about just demonstrating something seemingly quite simple.

CAN ONE PERSON SHOOT PHOTOGRAPHY AND VIDEOGRAPHY AT AN EVENT?

YOU NEED A PHOTOGRAPHER , AND YOU ALSO WANT A CORPORATE VIDEOGRAPHER, BUT YOUR BUDGET PAYS FOR ONLY ONE OF THEM - WHAT DO YOU DO?

The short answer is of course some people can do both. The challenge is finding someone who is genuinely good at both, which is not as easy as it sounds. There are plenty of great photographers out there who can’t really shoot video. There are some good videographers out there, though they are no nearly so easy to find, and some of them are competent photographers too.

Mar 5, 2023

WHY EITHER EVERYONE OR NO ONE NEEDS TO WORRY ABOUT AI

With the announcement that China-based NetDragon Websoft says it is the first company in the world to appoint an AI as its CEO only to see stocks soar, naturally it isn’t just struggling bloggers and graphic designers who are worried about the implication of AI

This is where I’d like to reassure you that climate change ravaging the planet and making the lives of those few who survive the catastrophic flooding, wild fires and raging hurricanes that are predicted absolute hell.

DISNEY 52 CLASSICS - HOW A CAMPAIGN OF FOUR COMMERCIALS WAS MORE THAN JUST MICKEY MOUSE

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