Parabella Show How They Made Tea for Twinings

If you've just watched the new spot from AMV BBDO London for Twinings tea and thought, 'well, that looks bloody impressive, I wonder how they did that', then you're in luck.

New Blinkink directing team Parabella [aka Mickey Please and Dan Ojari] are behind the spot, their first commercial, and below they tell us how they managed to create a brilliant, animated world from tea-tags and drop a real life actress into the middle of it. You can also watch the highly interesting making of film above.

Did you immediately know how you wanted to approach the film?

Absolutely not, but we had a few parameters to work within, namely we needed to make a real-life lady move through a world of tea-tags. For us the success of whatever we did hung on how that transition line between the real and animated world was treated. 

We explored several options but in the end, most of our references came from Golden Era musicals; their theatricality and unrestrained sense of goodwill then felt appropriate for the rest of the spot.

The design of the world itself gives a fair nod to David Hockney with a dash of pointillism. We were also lucky enough to work with illustrator Rob Hunter in the initial design stages who really helped pull those references together. 

Was the idea to use the little teabag labels already in there or was that something you added?

Yep, that was in the brief. Working with tiny squares of coloured paper could seem restrictive but actually the limitation was helpful in tying the world together, having one simple cohesive building block.

We ended up finding about 50 different styles of folded square and combinations of square to build up what became known as the Unholy Tag Bible.

The finished spot is beautifully complex; tell us a bit about the shooting/animation process and why you thought it worked for this project?

Thankfully we had an oh-so-powerful team to make our abstract whims into a technical reality. Automoatas, replacement models, big weird mechanisms that make things morph in-camera. All that over the top technical stuff was appropriate for this project because, well, we had 100,000 tea tags to play with and wanted to make them do unexpected things.

Without those moments of technical bewilderment we felt it would become far too safe. Those challenges kept things nice and awkward for us which definitely kept us on our toes.

How much difference does it make doing things in-camera as much as you’re able to?

It makes the world of difference. We tried to shoot as much of this in-camera as possible. It was important for us that we made her feel as connected to the world as possible. We used loads of little tricks; like where we couldn't build the entire set around her we filmed an animated cut-out silhouette so that all of her shadows and impact points were true to life. All that stuff helps.

How long did it take to make the spot?

A fair while! Though the actual production felt swift; pre-production was ten weeks, the shoot was two-and-a-half and the post was three weeks. But add onto that about two months of storyboarding and animatics at the beginning that went through audience testing, neuroscientists, crystal-ball taro-card reader... you name it. That phase really took the wind out of us.

What was the most complex part of the whole job?

Getting the pixilation to a level where the technique wasn't too jittery that it was distracting, and wasn't so fluid as to be mistaken for live-action was difficult and took weeks of rehearsal. Lydia [the actress] had to learn specific breathing techniques so that her lungs would hold the same volume of air for each photograph.

In some cases we had to build scaffolding around her to hold her position between frames. That looked amazing in the rushes, these metal arms dancing around a dancing lady, it was a shame not to keep it in the final film.

And the most rewarding?

The morph into the world shot. Seeing that slowly appear over a few days (and finally watching the finished thing in the early hours) was amazing. By powers of ten it was the smallest thing that took the longest time.

This is the shot where the sun rings expand out to form the town skyline. It was completely shot in-camera (minus the lady, alas) so took some hefty brain exercising to maths out the timing, speed and movement of all the individual elements.

We spent months building card models, pre-vised the heck out of it, but at the end of all that we got to the shoot and still had to take a giant leap of faith. the whole thing was shot backwards, we only had one model of the town and the shot involved slowly destroying everything we'd built. If it went wrong there were no second chances!

Thankfully it looked even better than we'd ever hoped. Rewarding and relieving in equal amounts.