[BTS] 6,878 Hours To Make One Awesome 30 Second Ad

There’s something to be said for painstakingly creating an entire scene by hand, out of nothing but paper. The thing you say is WOW! British production company Blink, with direction by Joseph Mann, worked with a team of paper artists to create elements for this Peugeot ad. See below for the ad, followed by the behind the scenes video that shows all the work put into this awesomely crafted commercial.

It looks like they are using a Canon 5D Mark 2 to shoot stills, on some kind of motion controlled rig. The fact that they actually put a small battery into the car to make the lights work is amazing attention to detail. We've seen great work from Blink before, as with their music video where they cut everything in half. Personally, I don't know if I'd have the patience to make each piece by hand. How about you?

Making Of 'Peugeot - Paperwork' from Blink on Vimeo.

Mike Wilkinson's picture

Mike Wilkinson is an award-winning video director with his company Wilkinson Visual, currently based out of Lexington, Kentucky. Mike has been working in production for over 10 years as a shooter, editor, and producer. His passion lies in outdoor adventures, documentary filmmaking, photography, and locally-sourced food and beer.

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12 Comments

I give it two A's. Amazing and Awesome!

brilliant...wish I had this patience :-)

amazing!!

its cool but...
this ads looks like it was made with 3d software so why they didnt made this one using 3d gfx with 3d software?  effect could be the same and its could took less time )

Ya they did such a good job it doesn't seem like humans could pull that off with stop motion. I've never seen anything like this so perfect. 

Definitely some 3D pre-visualization done, probably a proof of concept to get approval from the client before putting in all the time and labor to make the elements out of paper, plus it gave the crew a reference for exactly how many frames they needed to shoot. I think the effect of doing it all in 3D could be similar, but I feel like there's something pure about doing it this way, and I think it does add to the overall aesthetic. (Sort of like getting an amazing shot in-camera, and not having to use photoshop to clean it up or fake anything)

and it adds conversation points around the adds so people talk about it.... Good art makes more noise than a cost effective ad campain

wow, that was amazing

nice!

This is realy awesome, we just finished a project similar to this for school, around 5500 man work hours too. I really feel the pain of building everything by hand.

If you want to see it. 
https://vimeo.com/33605630.
Comments would be nice also if possible. 

So creative.  Just wonderful.

I think this was one of the worst BTS i've seen. It was like an extended commercial, how about talking about the behind the scenes. Besides telling us how many boulders, cones and spaners they made, how about telling us what camera they used and what the interval stop units were, what type of dolly they had, how long each car took,  what was their 3d software and where it cam to play ( 3ds max, maya, c4d etc....), and why they used it in the first place if they were making it out of paper. If I were to make this and used my 3d software i would take photos of just the car and props and used them as baked textures in 3d and animate this in half the time that it took them to shoot it without losing quality. But that's just my opinion.