My first stop was looking into HSBC as a business. I couldn't advertise them until I knew what they were all about. Thankfully the packs included in the project told me a good amount about the company before I even began to trawl their website. Thankfully, unlike some companies in the brief, HSBC hadn't misled anyone with their booklet and backed up all the claims they had made. I also looked for elements in the brand and ethos I could explore for my campaign. Their excellent customer satisfaction ratings and personal approach were the main thing I jumped on and tried to figure out how to weaponise it as an advertising campaign.
I also looked into other advertising campaigns both from HSBC and other banks. And sadly HSBC is a bit behind the curve advertising-wise. The main frontrunner I found was Lloyds TSB and their previous fantastic 3D animated approach that they used until recently. It hits most of the right notes of heart and charm and really gives of the impression of trustworthy-ness and working on a personal scale. It's just a fantastic campaign and works very well.
For the art of this unit Multiplex gave me the confidence to push my vector art to a high standard. It's a webcomic made entirely in vectors and manages to have some really nice looking art despite being done in such a clean, nearly emotionless style. If anything that was my aim for this project: bringing emotion to the emotionless. I'm so pleased I stuck with it as I managed to make a really charming animation using the medium.
I also did a whole lot of research into dogs for the project. I've never been great at drawing them so I wanted some good references. I also had no idea what breed of dog I wanted. So in Jonny tradition I put together a collage of dog ideas. These things really help when I'm struggling with ideas as it allows me to take my mind off the work for an hour or so and puts together a great board of references. I tend to do one or two of these for each project and it really helps.
In the end I went for a golden retriever, mostly inspired by the behavior of Jasper, my cousin's dog, who is excellent at demolishing anything not above table-height. Jasper is such a cutie too.
I put together a second mood board for the biscuits. I was having trouble deciding which biscuits to use so I figured this would help. And it defintely did. Just a few minutes after I made this I had created a set of biscuit sketches and moved into illustrator.
The perspective with the hands and the camera is a direct result of me watching too many Youtube reviews. Most of them use a hands-only-on-camera setup and that translated nicely to a video like this. It allowed me to keep focus on what was happening on the table whilst still keeping some human influence. I'm really happy with this decision. The key inspiration here is Stuart Ashen, who does a huge amount with the format.
For the game I had to do another round of research into smartphone games and tie-ins. The research into tie-in games was quickly abandoned because most I found were really poor, so I looked for far better games to use as inspiration, as I figured that the poor quality was likely a result of a lack of care rather than the medium. As predicted, most of the more successful games are puzzle games as they have the most longevity to them and benefit most from the smartphone as a platform.
Working with biscuits, I figured something akin to Tetris would work well. But rather than simply making a clone of the arcade classic, I began to inject some new ideas into its veins. I pulled the building society theme into it by using a full house pattern, and began to build features around this. Using Bones I also made the dog relevant and created the scoring system based around Crumbs, a spare word I had from when I made my biscuit typography.
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