Production Design and Art Direction from Bruce Hill
WOOLWORTHS EASTER COMMERCIALS. BBC/ MALCOM RYAN STUDIO
It seemed only a short time since doing the Christmas ads but thankfully this one was to be shot in the UK. The brief; make a beautiful English meadow in a studio. As ever, this was February so it wasn't possible to use many real flowers. I've had this on many occasions when we have to find things out of season so when the ad comes out, it's in season.
Scenic artwork is very effective for this kind of job, you can paint any season on a cyclorama so I designed the job around the background with the real scenery there just to compliment what was painted. The set photos show the gradual progression of the build over the three days. Thanks to an idea by Callum Andrews (construction manager) I decided to undulate the steeldeck rostrums to create the foreground hills, as opposed to building the undulations on the rostrums. This saved money on timber and build time. The other specialist contributor was Living Props, who supplied all the grass, greenery, flowers and the main tree. We had three different grades of grass from fine golfing grass for the background to rough meadow grass for the foreground. The flowers were mainly silk other than very early daffodils and marigolds for the immediate foreground.
I had to make some make some major set design assumptions while we were building as the clients hadn't yet signed off the scripts. Because we didn't have the storyboards, I didn't know where the puppets would be (each puppet needs it's own trap under the floor).
I decided to make a central trap under the floor as an ideal puppet area and put every rostrum around it on wheels to reduce the shoot revamp time (the time needed to reset for the next shot). This worked extremely well, so well in fact that we were slightly ahead of schedule so the clients started writing in extra scenes. Win some, lose some, I suppose!