Specsavers' Rapunzel: The Making Of
The Kitchen recently worked with Specsavers on the retelling of the Rapunzel classic with a humorous twist, for their latest TVC. The brief was to show how Specsavers are now able to offer home eye tests for those who cannot easily travel to a store, in a fun and engaging way. The client was keen to show this fairy tale world in a traditional hand drawn style taking inspiration from early-animated films. And there's good news for animation nerds as the team have put together a gorgeous GIF-tastic behind the scenes run down.
Character development
Our character designer Jacob Merrick-Wolf, began working up the initial designs for the Knight, his trusty steed and Rapunzel. These were then followed by the dragon who needed to look menacing but still approachable. We wanted to keep the classic fairytale of damsel in distress and knight in shining armour whilst steering away from Disney to make them unique to Specsavers and this commercial.
We started by creating a rough thumbnail board outlining the action, which we then took into the animatic stage. This gave us the opportunity to tweak and re-order shots until we had a good flow to the narrative. We were able to look at the timing and pacing as well as cutting to a guide voice over.
Environment Development
When thinking of the overall look and feel of the commercial, we decided fairly early on to concentrate a lot of the detail into the background environments and to keep the characters more stripped back, with flat shading along with a simple shadow and highlight pass.
This allowed Chervelle Fryer - one of Jelly London's 'Future's' illustrators - to create a world which is rich with texture and detail. She did a fantastic job of bringing our initial background sketches to life with an impressive level of realism and a beautiful colour palette, which compliments the characters perfectly.