“This year’s Suchard announcement…I cried”; “I don’t understand why I’m crying over a video of Suchard’s damn nougat, I’ll block you”; “I can’t help but get excited every time I see it.” These are some of the dozens of messages that have been flooded. The promotional video is a Pixar-style animated short film featuring two grandparents who reminisce about how the holiday has been the scene of the most important family moments for several decades.
“Do you think we did well?” the husband asks the wife at the beginning of the video. The answer is given in a series of year-end holiday memories, including the tradition of eating the 12 grapes as a family, gifts to grandchildren, the arrival of the first son-in-law, watching the countdown on television to the New Year, pets like another household member or leave the milk and chocolate to the Three Wise Men. The ad ends with the sentence: “Life is what happens between Christmas and Christmas.” The Ogilvy agency was responsible for development, production was handled by Hogarth and the animation studios Passion Pictures (Great Britain) and Megacomputer (France).
“We didn’t expect this success. It is a thousand times more than what we predicted, it was all organic,” assures Jesús Rasines, Executive Creative Director of Ogilvy, to this medium. Due to the necessary preparation time, animations are usually not used in short commercial films; However, according to the development team, it offers other benefits such as greater creative freedom. “We wanted to universalize the story. You identify more [con los personajes animados] and in this case he seems to be the granddaddy of them all,” explains Félix Carral, creative director of Ogilvy, a brand that will also develop Decathlon’s Christmas advertising.
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The development process took between six and seven months between creating the story, designing the characters with a pencil and then animating them on the computer. “We wanted to take a life and destroy it. We had about 25 or 30 crucial moments, so the difficulty was not in including those sentimental scenes, but in choosing the ones that were left out,” explains Carral. The short film spans several years and attempts to portray every stage of life: the illusory childhood, the rebellious youth and the regression in old age.
The character design for the animated short film by Suchard.Ogilvy
As for the Pixar style Many people on social networks have identified themselves, Rasines says that it is “impossible” not to think of the Disney label because they are the “kings of animation,” but that the goal is to get away from their “perfect aesthetic.” “We wanted to distance ourselves and not be completely idealistic with the character designs, as they had imperfections that every family in Spain could identify with,” he emphasizes. Carral adds: “The real image gives you a lot of information such as origin or social class, while the animation allows you to ignore these appearances and have a higher level of emotion without appearing cheesy.”
The spot was presented last Tuesday in a special screening with media and brand ambassadors and has been circulating on social networks and television since Wednesday.
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