We defined our creative strategy for 2017 as ‘Build the most epic expression of ‘You’re So

MoneySuperMarket’ yet, by harnessing our audiences’ collective love of the ‘80s’.

As such, we turned to Action Man - everyone’s favourite 80’s childhood toy and all his

wonderful different guises and used an army of Action Man characters to perform to the

nostalgic track ‘Finally’ by CeCe Peniston.

Shooting miniatures does bring some challenges however, especially regarding

depth of field. When one is working at the limits of minimum focus, it can be hard to hold

focus even between quite closely placed objects. Wide lenses and very tight fstops can help

alleviate this problem. Also, in animation the proximity of the camera can hinder access to

the animator and relative to the puppets the camera is the size of a small car so moving it in

limited space can be challenging.

For Action Man, the main problem was his very shiny plastic flesh which was highly

reflective so we used a lot of polarisers to help that out!

The brief was that Action Man needed to lip sync to the VO as well as have subtle facial

animation. Due to a tight schedule it was not possible to achieve this in camera so it had to

be done in post.

Because of the scale of the sets the backgrounds are digital matte paintings which were

added during post. They had to match the set and look natural as it was shot in camera

which required a lot of skill.