I made this TV spot to advertise giffgaff's phone recycling service for D&AD New Blood 2021. giffgaff has a history of TV ads that have caused controversy because of how dark or inappropriate they are. I decided to go with this style and make something that was creepy and weird. I used David Firth's animations as inspiration because I liked his use of real faces and images, which creates an uncanny valley look to his work. I added some Easter eggs that relate to horror films. For example, Cedric's lettuce from Basketcase 3 and some snapped pencils from Re-Animator.
I created a storyboard because it let me plan everything that I wanted to include, which meant that I knew exactly what I was doing when I came to animate it. It was also useful for pitching my idea because it shows what will happen and what sounds/dialogue would be used. The TV spot had to be 20 seconds, so it was very useful for planning everything within the required timeframe.
I hadn't used this style before, so I made a character to test out the look and to help me practise creating elements in this style.
I layered the masked person's face to make it able to blink. I wanted to do this because the mask made it easy to do and it added more life to the character. I made a quick animation of the character blinking to test how it would look before I used it in the final animation.