Aardman Animates Critter Conversations for Coinbase
Today, American cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has launched its latest campaign, ‘Human Nature’, presenting genuine conversations around finances through charming, stop-motion animals, courtesy of Academy Award-winning British animation studio, Aardman.
Brits will be very familiar with Aardman’s ‘Creature Comforts’ format – talking animals that serve as the visuals for real vox-pop-style conversations. Coinbase is now leveraging the stop-motion magic for cultural conversations Stateside, using this series of spots to raise financial topics that are making the American dream harder to achieve today.
The campaign’s seven films were designed to disarm its audience with a cast of cute critters – albeit discussing serious financial woes – presenting crypto, and the Coinbase platform, as a solution; a tool for increasing financial freedom beyond the traditional system.
“As longtime fans of Aardman’s work, our hearts were fluttering a bit when we reached out,” said Jean Morrow, group creative director at the Coinbase Creative Studio. “Our aim was always to lean on their expertise as artists and storytellers, so we collaborated with their team at every turn. From letting them guide us towards who had the most unique voices to helping us maintain the conversational Aardman tone, even as we spoke about financial topics.”
She added, “In a lot of our work, we ask people to examine the financial system and their relationship with their own economic future. Most people don’t really want to think about that stuff. Yet Aardman’s style provides a charming and humorous way to discuss those challenging topics and examine heavy doses of reality.”
The casting process for the films consisted of over 70 self-tapes and nine full-length interviews. This meant that around 36 cumulative hours of conversation had to be reviewed to identify the most resonant, and entertaining, moments for the ads.
Discussing the interview process, Jean said, “Initially, it began with a list of questions about their financial lives and their experience in our current economy, but often the best responses came when people wandered into their own train of thought. We encouraged people to truly be themselves throughout the interviews, whether that was bickering or snacking. Both of which made it into the final films.”
With no knowledge of who the real people behind the voices were, Aardman built little narratives and chose different animals and settings for the voices, based on what they said and how the audio sounded. For example, one interview had a metallic echo, so they presented the family as raccoons in a dumpster.
For the campaign, Aardman designed and crafted 28 puppets with 416 mouth replacements, and shot between 60 and 70 frames per day – for a total of 16,400 frames across the whole production. This works out to around 2.5 seconds of stop-motion footage per day.
The campaign is now being broadcast on TV, including during WNBA games, and being distributed across digital and social channels. And while the project is aimed at helping the general public, the Coinbase creatives have also used learnings from the project’s interviews to shape future brand messaging.
“We went into the interviews with a few hunches and some research, but some truths just hit harder when you hear dozens of real people saying the same thing,” said Jean. “The challenges of homeownership in our current financial system came up time and time again in the interviews, and we’ve revisited that topic in other brand work since then with even greater conviction.
“More broadly, the current financial system just isn’t working for most average Americans who are trying to save money and support their families. We heard that loud and clear and are doing our best to show an alternate path for folks.”
