In Los Angeles, Christmas starts in September. If you work in commercial production, that is! Indeed it takes a couple of months for projects to get greenlit and produced in time for airing during the holiday season. So it was that last year I was working on a fun Christmas project for my clients at PSYOP- storyboarding the delightful tale of Kevin the Christmas Carrot- a character conceived for an Aldi holiday commercial. Aldi, if you don’t know, is a popular European supermarket chain.
The commercial is really sweet and funny- a plucky little carrot just wants to meet Santa, and must brave the dangers of the Christmas dinner table in order to do so. He dodges hazards of all kinds, and collapses next to Santa’s mince pie and brandy (it’s a UK commercial, so no cookies and milk in this one… in fact, it’s not Santa, it’s Father Christmas!).
It’s all self-explanatory and I’m really excited to show you the boards:
And here’s a link to the final video!
It turned out so great! Looks like they opted NOT to go with the full widescreen aspect ratio. I think it might have looked more epic if they did, but I can also see where the 16×9 is a little more suited for a sense of comedy, which was just as important.
There was a lot of brainstorming and tossing out all kinds of ideas that might work as potential hazards for the ‘journey’ montage. Here’s a few that I thought were really clever (and well-drawn by me!)
What a fun project! I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. This campaign tested so well, the client decided to make a sequel! I storyboarded that one too, so I’ll post that when I have more time.
Till then!
-Max
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