Framestore has worked with Leo Burnett London on the latest commercial for Kellogg’s Crunchy Nut Cornflakes, a spoof nature programme that ends painfully for a snake handler after he is distracted by his assistant loudly chomping on a bowl of cereal. The advert, directed by MJZ’s Rocky Morton, required Framestore to create and composite the CG snake, as well as changing the position of the dog in the scene by compositing in legs and ears. The kitchen also required a post production clean up and boxes of cereal that hadn’t been shot in situ had to be added in.
"Working with MJZ's Rocky Morton and Leo Burnett's Producer Bruce Macrae was a pleasure and with Rocky's vision the shoot was a great success. Back at Framestore we had a challenging schedule in which we had to create a realistic snake to blend seamlessly with the live action footage. Due to the fast turnaround everything overlapped, but the team gelled together and with the support of our production pipeline we were able to achieve excellent results very quickly" said Alex Doyle, the Lead Technical Director on the project .
According to one of the animators, Steve Townrow, the advert was a "fun but challenging animation task, particularly the shots where the snake has to appear to interact with the live action actor. In order to match the live action we had to track his leg movement precisely with a CG modelled leg and wrap our snake around that. We used reference footage to accurately simulate the way snakes move and behave, but unfortunately there isn't much footage of a snake attached to a man's leg, so this came down to our own artistic interpretation. Overall we feel we have achieved some believable and yet quite creepy animation."
