What The Future
By Leilani Croucher
I often get a script where the creatives say “GO CRAZY”, and usually my brand of CRAZY is a bit much. But here, apparently, it was just right (even if we did kill a light-up brain set). Sometimes you just need to stretch it a little to make something that people actually give a fuck about, with a great idea and a tone of voice that was tongue in cheek – this was a no brainer 😉.
A talking puppet worm on a glittery giant apple was the one BIG thing the client was terrified of, and yet it ended up everyone’s favourite part. Proof that YES, doing things practically (or as practically as possible) is worth it. YES to being a bit silly, YES to having actual fun, and NO to taking advertising too seriously.
This one was truly collaborative, every set, every prop piece was built with ridiculous detail. Production Designer Helen Fitzgerald really took my ramblings and brought it to life. We wanted the dream world to feel slightly “off”: sets painted in flat matte colours to give it a theatrical strangeness, oversized groceries that felt just wrong enough, and even custom-designed product labels that were all hand-painted. A real workshop vibe where craft mattered.
INSERT HERE maybe thoughts about groceries
Our DOP Andy Commis (absolute master of a lighting cue) built these gorgeous, hypnotic shots where the lights pulsed and the camera just drew you in. Simple? Yes. Effective? Always. No gimmicks, no fancy camera trickery, just clean, evolving shots that let the idea breathe. No motion control no worries… but we got there! We even built a time-lapse of a paper mache leaf unfurling, rigged with wires and an intricate lighting setup that tracked the “sun” over hundreds of stills. Maths and craft – who knew they’d get along?
The trickiest bit? Turning the “here’s all the great things our university does” section into something that didn’t look like students blankly staring at laptops. We went deep into research: digging up footage, images, graphs, stock – the lot, then slicing and manipulating it into a rush of information, a proper torrent of good stuff instead of death-by-bullet-point.
Enter Scott: post supervisor, worm puppeteer, editor, grader, online wizard, basically a one-man Swiss Army knife. It might’ve pushed him slightly round the bend, but thank god he was there.
Music. How do we do it without tipping into naff? Without it sounding… wrong? Like all good things, it came down to the right people. Otis built the beats, stripped them back, shuffled them around, cut lyrics with us, and even laid down a guide read that everyone nearly fell in love with. We tested every voice, style and delivery under the sun, and in the end Mykada nailed it – the perfect mix of sass, cheek, youthfulness and energy.
