Building Deliveroo’s Foodie Metropolis Celebrating Local Cuisine

“Deliveroo knows all the good spots” in any flavour town out there, and more specifically in their newly created, super colourful, animated foodtopia for the global brand platform ‘It’s All On Your Doorstep.’

Coming out earlier this month, the campaign was created by Pablo London with by Stink Films’ directors WATTS (Jenna and Tripp Watt) who are known for their rainbow worlds, miniatures and experimental craft.

In the two radiant spots, Deliveroo introduces us to a neighbourhood “bustling with flavour” - the dream for any foodie. Cuisine from all over the world on every corner, always available to be delivered on your doorstep and certainly made with love. As we follow the animated Deliveroo driver into the town, the spot becomes a mixed-media roller coaster, with miniatures that look like giant pizzas, burgers and ramen bowls, surrounded by 2D animation. What is most remarkable about the two films is that while they feel like one long shot of a camera zooming through a town for 30 seconds, they are in reality an intricate maze of differently-sized, and differently-made sets with both real and fake food.

The delivery service giant has always thrived on the bustling food scenes within which it operates. It only comes naturally that it has dedicated itself to celebrating them and their diversity. This is why the new brand identity had to be a homage to all the small things that make up and keep the Deliveroo ecosystem going in any town, no matter how big or small - the restaurants, the community, its drivers, and of course, the food.

For WATTS, the first task that came with this was to figure out how all of these elements connect to each other. “To connect the dots, we designed the foodie metropolis, where we see them all come together,” they explain. “The metropolis had to feel globally ambiguous and combine real delicious food with interesting characters.” It’s a good thing that WATTS have never been strangers to world building, so this soon became their “dream project”.

When creating the foodie metropolis, inspirations were drawn from all over the place - “Mister Rogers’ Neighbourhood, Sesame Street, retro Looney Tunes, Akira, Nickelodeon cartoons and FLCL” in no particular order. With references and borrowed ideas galore, what really led the creative on the town’s aesthetic was the way in which the Deliveroo driver weaves through it to connect the different characters and places.

“It was such a fun task. We built the entire miniature set in 3D first, so that we could pre-viz and block all the camera moves. The characters were designed in part by our go-to designer Nahuel Bardi as well as our animation partner Rudo,” say Jenna and Tripp.

Not only were WATTS allowed to do what they do best - create a completely new world for a brand - but they were also encouraged by Laura Rogers, global creative director at Pablo, to explore any medium they thought worked best with the campaign. Immediately, the answer was miniatures.

“We’ve always loved miniatures, but we find they often come off looking too still, twee or flat. This is why we wanted to shoot them like an action movie car chase sequence. We were excited to build the set and then shoot it with fast camera moves on a Bolt camera.”

Pretty much everything in the two spots for the campaign was shot on a probe lens, which is a lens that, simply put, makes small things look big. WATTS had to also do a lot of pre-viz to make sure the camera would actually fit within the sets - it helped that some of them were modular, which allowed for removal of pieces to achieve particular shots. 

The directors’ favourite scene is the barrel street. “Deliveroo wanted to showcase fried chicken, donuts, and sushi, so we came up with the idea of a seamless rolling street where the dishes were the roofs of the houses. We decided we would live on donut street!”

The actual food within the campaign was shot practically within the miniatures, so it was also very important to think about how it would fit in the set, how it would be styled and lit. In comes food stylist Elaine Ngan, who helped WATTS do a cook up a few days before the shoot, so that they could see everything up-close and personal pre-shoot. “Elaine would also make us congee every morning for breakfast, which is one of our favourite meals,” the Watts add. 

Because of the differences in size and mixed media used on set, one of the biggest challenges of the spots was to keep them feeling like a stream of consciousness through the town, which was the initial idea. “We wanted to see the driver go seamlessly through the Deliveroo world of restaurants, chefs, foodies, and more. Connecting it all was imperative and also meant mixing all these different scales. The pizza oven, for example, was a life-sized pizza oven, which seamlessly transitions to the interior of the miniature pizza joint. We then fly upwards to follow the noodle up to the top of the skyscraper. The skyscraper was actually pretty big - taller than Jenna - seeing as it had to fit a bowl of real ramen at the top.”

All of this was done in a mere three days. “Every shot was complex and there was a lot of food styling involved. To make it all work we had three teams working simultaneously. One stop motion team, one B camera team capturing various plate shots, and then our primary camera team using the moco. It helped that there are two of us,” explain WATTS. “We spent a lot of time bouncing around between all the different setups.”

Oh, and in case you didn’t notice - WATTS and their producer Charlotte added themselves in the ad. “Not sure we told anyone about it actually,” they laugh. “We’re on the rooftop to the right when the rider zips down the alleyway. Jenna is the spicy one telling the story, Tripp’s giggling in pink, and Charlotte is clutching her backpack!”