Maldon Salt - Mini Christmas Animation

In 2021, world-renowned artisan salt producer, Maldon Salt, was looking to trumpet a bold new visual brand identity by producing a short, but impactful social video.

Maldon’s marketing and PR agency, Jellybean Creative Solutions, therefore briefed Dead Ready Productions to produce a short and stylish, disruptive stop motion video, to promote the relaunch at Christmas.

Maldon Salt was keen to prominently feature the real-life product, as opposed to following a motion graphics approach, to ensure audiences could easily connect the subject of the video with the physical product at point of purchase.

Further to this, they were also interested in the idea of revealing the new-look packaging through a gift-unwrapping concept, so the animation team at Dead Ready Productions set about producing an engaging and dynamic stop motion video featuring the product unwrapping and re-wrapping itself. 

Stop motion is an animation technique where real world objects and models are physically manipulated in small increments between individually photographed frames, so that they appear to exhibit independent motion or change when the series of frames is played back at speed.

Stop motion animation is painstaking work and even the simplest of videos require a great deal of planning, but the end results can add real character, helping to bring a charm and informality to promotional video content.  

To create the animation’s Christmas feel, we used Dead Ready Productions in-house stylists and hoped to shoot against our freshly painted greenscreen – but foliage doesn’t tend to key against green that well, so we popped out a temporary bluescreen instead. This allowed us to replace the background with a suitably festive scene sourced from online libraries. 

To avoid any issues around the use of fire in the new studio, the candle flames were motion tracked onto the real-life candles and composited on the footage seamlessly – it’s details like this that make working on stop motion videos so satisfying! 

A Sony A7r Mkiii camera was mounted on a Edelkrone SliderPLUS to move the camera’s position over time. This unique piece of kit allowed us to programme the camera to advance along the rail at specific increments, thus involving camera motion in animation. 

The finished animation achieved the following results: 

• A reach of over 27,000  
• It received over 300 engagements 
• Resulted in almost 200 Maldon Salt profile visits 

Mary Heimsath, Account Manager at Jellybean Creative Solutions, comments on the campaign and the experience of working with Dead Ready Productions; 

“This project felt like a Christmas miracle! We tasked the Dead Ready Productions team to create a festive, stop motion animation that celebrated Maldon Salt’s beautiful new branding. What they delivered, within an extremely short time frame, was stunning.” 

With regard to the experience of working with Dead Ready Productions, Mary continues; 

“The client loved it so much that they asked for further stop motion animation videos, alongside the multitude of other video projects we produce with Dead Ready Productions to support our other clients. We always trust Dead Ready Productions to bring to life our vision and we are constantly impressed by their creativity and level of detail.” 

With product styling and stop motion action conducted by our Animator, Mia Moore, camera work handled by our Head of Live Action, Nick Thornthwaite and directed by Creative Director, Chris Tongue, the project was very much a team effort. 

If you would like to find out more about the services Dead Ready Productions offer, please feel free to get in touch via the button below or by calling +44 (0)208 339 6139.

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