Skittles, the brightly colored candy, has launched a new brand: Smoothie Mix Skittles. This time, the candy combines all the different fruit flavors used in the original sweets to create these new flavors. This new line was launched with two :30 spots that focus on mixing up two unbelievable items. These challenging vfx heavy spots were created by Mill New York, who was involved right from pre-production.
The first spot shows two sheep with human boys heads in a farmyard talking about the impossible blend of a mango and an orange in a smoothie sweet. To create this look, a clean background plate of the farmyard was shot. Originally, the idea had been to shoot both the sheep and the boys in the farmyard environment to help match all lighting to the background farmyard plates unfortunately on the day of the shoot the wind was blowing too strongly so an additional day had to be organized in a studio for the sheep/ boy section of the shoot.
This also required the sheep having wind blown on them in the studio shoot so that they would match more closely with their blustery background plates. The sheep were shot eating pellets off the tree stump that features in the final spot the boys were then shot matching their head positions as closely as possible to their sheep counterparts.
The boys were also dressed in woollen wigs and collars in the hope that this would help in combining the boy and sheep plates once in post. From here the shots were then turned over to Mill flame artist Angus Kneale and his team to create the hybrid. The first job was to match all the takes where the boys and sheep were in similar positions and then using the warper in flame to blend the most accurate ones together so that the movements fitted seamlessly.
The Mill credits include:Producer: Verity Grantham Lead Flame: Angus KnealeFlame Assist: Westley Sarokin, Dave Parker
London-based The Mill (www.the-mill.com) specializes in high-end visual effects for commercials, music promos and television. Since 1990, The Mill has built an impressive client-base of some of the worlds best commercials directors, and advertising agencies handling accounts such as Levis, Pepsi, Guinness, BMW and Mercedes-Benz. In May 2002, The Mill opened in New York.
Bill Desowitz, former editor of VFXWorld, is currently the Crafts Editor of IndieWire.
