Heinz Salad Cream Advert

For our Business of the Animation module we are given a mixture of live and existing briefs to choose from, although we get choose our project we are told to strictly follow the brief as if we were actually working for a client; this is largely emphasised in this module.

Heinz want to re-engage their consumers with a new identity for Salad cream attracting young people and encouraging them to accompany the sauce with all of their favourite foods. The advert should generate a fun and upbeat message and contain food values (but not high brow food) associating it with pizza, chips etc.

So the concept I came up with plays with the salad cream slogan 'it has to be heinz' while adding 'salad dressing' at the start of the phrase, the animation is of actual salad dressing up in clothes which represent the salad cream and eventually turning into a plate of salad with a burger. Although the food featured in the animation isn't necessarily associated with Salad Cream e.g tomatoe, I nevertheless used them because they were more suitable for the pun intended. I feel that the animation not only targets young adults because of the memorable pun, it could also pull into a younger audience because of the light-hearted and cartoony illustrations.

As I am very comfortable with Illustrator I drew all of the assets in there knowing that I can easily transfer .ai files into After Effects. After Effects is still very new to me, portraying my idea with the program posed difficulty at first, however I applied what I already knew of the animation principles, utilizing squash and stretch, pacing and exaggeration.

There are a few techniques that are not very noticeable but can seriously change the pacing of the animation if they are not incorporated. For example, all incoming objects all have a bounce before it arrives at its destination, the eye expects this type of motion to occur, without it the movement of the object will look very unnatural. I also manually animated the Heinz bottle using a squash and stretch effect, however I found it difficult to ease out the bottle back to its neutral position so instead I applied an expression to do this and combined it with the manual animation.