Produced by Nexus Productions (Chris O’Reilly, Juliette Sten, Kara McCombe)
Creatives – Tony Malcolm and Guy Moore (Leo Burnett)
Food photography – Charlie Stebbins at Park Village
Sound – Parv et al at Wave
The crew is too long to list but shall get them up here when I have time. Special mention going to Brad Noble for the initial modelling and generally for his services to rigging!
The Beefy and Lamby Campaign
A campaign that ran (and I guess is still running) for EBLEX, the English Beef and Lamb Executive to advertise a quality standard for meat production. Starring two cricketers, Ian ‘Beefy’ Botham and Alan ‘Lamby’ Lamb, famous in their 80’s hayday (and still now) it was initally thought that the campaign could be live action.
The first scripts were utterly bonkers and we were approached to see if there was a possibility to do it animated. Since we had just been playing around with a hair plug-in for 3DS Max we thought we would take mullets as our starting point and Brad Noble (all round rigging genius that he is) modelled up two very early ideas for them and we pitched it as a charming domestic sit-com from the 80s. I absolutely loved getting it all together and trying to make a suburban idyll with two, essentially manly, sportsmen living together in an almost Morecambe and Wise setting, getting across the bickering but caring housewife/husband dynamic which isn’t too far from the truth when you get them together.
Ian Botham and Alan Lamb voiced the entire thing and were very funny to work with and Bloers did the end VO. For the fifth instalment the wonderful umpiring legend Dickie Bird came all the way from his home up north to provide the one line for his voice (”Hello chaps”).
As I said it was extremely satisfying getting the domestic suburban feel to the films as was getting the feeling that this was part ’sit-com’ a lá Terry and June with all the external views into the garden being made from painted flats. Through the films we played around with different times of the day although I think my favourite (for a lot of reasons including its use of prime-time nudity) was Streaker.
Beefy and Lamby 01 – Testmatch
Beefy and Lamby 02 – Streaker
Beefy and Lamby 03 – Rubbing
Beefy and Lamby 04 – Mince
Beefy and Lamby 05 – Doppelganger
Other things of interest…
Pitch film
We wanted to get across the very simple idea of domesticity and establish the relationship between the two of them with a very simple situation with no extra detailing. It’s remarkeably close to how they are in real life, both the bad jokes and the bickering, and has that lovely saturday afternoon feel I used to have when I stayed with my dad as a teenager. Aaaah.
‘Mince’ animatic
To show you the development of an idea here’s the animatic for the ‘Mince’ advert.