Cadbury’s Case Study

We began by running a few tests on Bodil’s illustrations. First, we produced a quick frame-by-frame animation, which produced engagingly playful results. This approach, however, wouldn’t allow for much flexibility considering the large number of image assets required per hand – and there were quite a few different characters’ hands to animate.

Our next approach was to create the hands in 3D with the same base model and rig, but with an adjusted texture map and scale to match each unique character. This way we could more easily adapt the lighting and angles of the hands in each scene, and reuse them across multiple assets.

VCCP pitched the approach to the client who loved the test and decided to move forward with our stylised 3D hands.

We drew the details of each hand on top of the models in Cinema4D and used Sketch and Toon rendering to add a grainy shadow to each hand, matching the distinctive speckled shadow from Bodil’s original illustrations. This technique gave us a consistent dynamic shadow on all the hands regardless of how they moved in the animation.

We were given some lovely product shots from VCCP to integrate with our illustrated hands. These photos included some chocolate fingers that were to be picked up and exchanged between our various characters’ hands. Because the chocolate fingers were supplied as photographs, we decided to remodel them in 3D so that we could move them about in the scene where they would adapt to the lighting. These photoreal 3D biscuits acted as a nice bridge between the illustration style of the 3D hands and the product photography, tying all the elements together.

Finally, we composited each scene on a textured Cadbury purple background from Bodil, and dropped in some subtle shadow to give the scene depth.

The final 7 scenes were used across the UK and Europe as part of Cadbury’s “Fingers Big and Small” campaign. Watching them still makes us want to nab a chocolate finger!