Nutella – Spread the Happy – Max Forward

Here’s a fun quick one! I boarded out this spot for my great clients at Brand New School– they do great work and are always involved in fun, whimsical, creative projects. Nutella was no exception. The concept was clear and well developed- and they had great designers on the project, so I was able to reference lots of design frames and draw with confidence that my boards would look accurate.

It’s a simple spot- Our hero son comes down for breakfast and greets his mom, who is opening a jar of Nutella. In the background, the son’s backpack comes to life with some very cleverly blended stop motion and cel animation interacting together to represent a fruitful creative young mind, powered by Nutella, and ready for a great day at school. At the end, our animation pops back into real life, with Mom presenting the breakfast treat, and a great bite-and-react shot to follow, finished with a mandatory Logo and Tagline scene.

The biggest challenge on spots like this one is probably making a clear distinction between “drawn” elements and “real” elements- obviously, I’m drawing this by hand, as usual, so everything is a drawing by me, but parts of the storyboard are “drawings of childrens’ drawings.” How do we show which is which? In this case, we used a different color and texture of linework to show the difference, and it worked out great!

Here’s the boards: