Agency: CheethamBellJWT

Dreamy stop motion for fresh fish.

The ad was conceived by a creative trio of Andy Cheetham (creative director) Andrew Dobbie (writer) and James Ashworth (art director)

Andy Cheetham remembered a film that he’d come across in a BBC film network competition for a pop video by M.Craft. "The film featured a man who finds a boat parked outside his house one night and rows it through the streets of London. It was beautifully animated and the fit with our story was uncanny. We simply put 2 and 2 together. The idea of delivering Fresh fish direct to the store and this wonderfully simple animation technique. The film had all been shot on digital SLR cameras and as the brief was to produce the ad for a low budget the technique was perfect. "

The agency was really keen to use the original director.
Andy Cheetham: "All too often you see up and coming filmmaker’s work plagiarised by ad agencies. In turn agencies get a bad reputation for it. Honda Cog and other well known ads have been accused of such behaviour."

CBJWT tracked down the director Gemma Burditt who inspired this with their film at the BBC film network competition, through firstly leaving some feedback on the BBC Website and then through Facebook. It only took a few hours to make contact.

It was a true digital experience. A process that would have been really difficult up until only a couple of years ago.

Gemma was keen but had never made a commercial before having only been out of film school 2 years. So Bridget Pelicias producer at CBJWT teamed Gemma up with James Jeffries from Onward TV productions. James did an exceptionl job pulling pulling together the crew and schedule.
The job was shot over 2 nights in Northern Ireland.
Each Frame was shot individually, the rower and boat was picked up and moved a few feet the oars moved and the next shot was taken and so on. We had 3 different sets of oars with varying sections of blade removed so that the oars sink into the ground when pulled.
The ad was edited and retouched at 422 in Manchester by Andy Hunwick. Andy spent weeks painstakingly retouching every frame. His commitment to the job was extraordinary.
Paul Harrison then cut the soundtrack and we were done.
Andy Cheetham "In nautical terms this job had a following wind. Usually most jobs get compromised at some point. This one seemed to just get better every day".
The result is a better than we could have hoped, and airs in Northern Ireland in mid June.

CD: Andy Cheetham
AD: James Ashworth
CW: Andrew Dobbie