Cadbury Dairy Milk Biscuit commercial shot on CineAlta HD

Following in the footsteps of major brands like Adidas and Budweiser, Cadbury Trebor Bassett has successfully used CineAlta HD for the launch ad of its Cadbury Dairy Milk with Biscuit. The ten-second commercial, which is currently on air, is the invention of The Studio, the Birmingham-based design and communications unit owned by Cadbury Trebor Bassett. Executive producer for The Studio is Steve Morley, who pitched the idea of using CineAlta HD.

The ad is a brief introduction to the new biscuit bar. Morley explains: “It’s about a guy who goes into an office block and into a trendy area. He goes straight to a vending machine and focuses in on the choice between Cadbury Dairy Milk and a biscuit. He presses both buttons at the same time and the Cadbury Dairy Milk with Biscuit comes down the chute.”

The Studio has recently worked on modifications to a couple of high profile Cadbury commercials; to produce a launch commercial was a great opportunity. The script was the result of brainstorming by people from the 60-strong team at The Studio, led by The Studio’s creative director Gary Botten.

The ‘Filmic Look’
Producer/director for the commercial is Nigel Proctor, who worked on the commercial with DoP Derek Gruszeckyj and a team of camera operator, assistant and grip.

Proctor and Morley had never used HD before, but Morley was confident. “I don’t often work with film,” he says, “but I knew we were going to get film-like quality from digital, which I do know about.” His confidence was rewarded. “It’s perfect. It’s at least as good as film,” he says.

Proctor was also happy. “The decision to use digital was because we’d heard very good things about high definition, and we were looking for a cost effective solution.”

One of the other upsides of the HD, says Morley, was down to having a large monitor on the shoot. “The client was especially happy as you could see pictures as they were being shot. Not only was it exciting, but they could see exactly what they were getting.”

Shooting details
Proctor, who has plenty of experience shooting in film, decided to put that experience to use. “We treated it like film and it responded extremely well,” says Proctor. “The footage was underexposed slightly which gave us more latitude in post production to play around with the look. The HD has the advantages of tape, but a lot of the characteristics of film.”

His DoP, Gruszeckyj, has used HD before, including work on demos for Sony, and he is a convert to the medium. The cameras for the shoot were supplied by OpTex. “The Sony HDW-F900 is a very friendly piece of kit,” he says. “it’s flexible, comfortable to work with and the picture quality is superb.”

Gruszeckyj is only comfortable using the same crew and lighting as he would with film. “We exposed around f1.8 to f2.8. All the shots were Polarised, which helped to saturate the colours, and using long lenses (between 80mm and 120mm) gave us minimal depth of field, so it does look very sharp and helps to focus your eye on the action. The Sony HDW-F900 has the ability to hold a great amount of detail in the blacks, and still hold on to the highlights.”

Proctor was convinced by CineAlta and counters reservations from some editors about shooting on HD and post producing in SD. “I still think the results are fantastic,” he says. Most of the post-production was at The Studio, with fine-tuning done at Home. “We added a bit of very discreet moving noise pattern into the picture to give it a more filmic look and did some vignetting to make the edges of the picture slightly out of focus,” says Proctor. “We then graded it as you would film.”

Overall he’s enthusiastic about HD; “Everybody is extremely pleased with the commercial. I think it’s a great medium and I’ll certainly use it again.”

Morley has already suggested it for another commercial. “The success of this one has made us more confident about pitching the use of HD in future.”