Kat Speaks blog: Ted Baker and Stop Frame Animation Research

A brief I am working on currently with my work colleague Sophie is a campaign for Ted Baker for the launch of their Autumn/Winter collections.

As part of the campaign the store windows should be used as the primary vehicle. What the brief is asking for is something to grab peoples attention, and by this we could even ignore the fact that it is Autumn completely. It needed to be scale-able, simple to understand, must capture the British sense of humour and project Quirkiness.

One of our main ideas was to use British idioms, that we thought are British, Quirky, can be made strong visually and can specific idioms can be linked to weather. Initially we began visualizing such idioms as 'Raining cats and dogs' 'A penny for your thoughts' and 'Bakers Dozen' , but this lead onto another idea. 'Blown Away' by Ted Baker.

The idea was to have mannequins in the shop window but have them on a slant, infront of a huge fan (that would be hidden) to show them fighting against the wind. The clothes would be blown so the viewer can also see the inside of the garment, something you usually wouldnt see on static mannequins.

In the Background we thought of having a projection of things blowing in the wind. Either a shopping trolly, an old lady, even someone on rollerblades with a newspaper in their face. We thought this would be something humorous to add to the window, and the viewer would be more inclined to stick around and see what was going to blow past next.

This lead on to even more research and ideas as to how we could present this, and the technique of stop frame animation presented itself. Making something blow naturally across the screen proved tricky in filming, and so with research in to stop frame animation this seemed like a really interesting concept that seems like it would work well with our idea.

We decided to research into campaigns and performances that had used stop frame animation so we got a better idea of what to do. Here are some of the things we found. I find all of the se remarkable and mind boggling as to how much time it would had taken to stop-frame each one. It still seems exciting to have a go at doing this ourselves.