Behind The Scenes of Pilsner Urquell ‘Book of Legends’ Stop Motion Commercial – Second Home Studio
Birmingham based Second Home Studios have recently completed a promotional animated film for Pilsner Urquell created completely out of paper.
The film stems from a work of art by Su Blackwell that was originally used in Pilsner’s print campaign, but was then used by Chris Randall and his team to create the film semi-documenting the history of the gold lager from Pilsen.
Beginning with a look through the ‘Book of Legends’, the short film pans through a paper reconstruction of the main square in Pilsen, before showing the wheat and barley blooming in the fields outside. The narrator tells the story of how the little town of Pilsen was the first lace in the world to brew golden lager, and the piece includess exerts from the original proclamation of intent when the brewery was first founded.
In an exclusive chat, Chris told Skwigly that using paper as the medium for the piece was simply an expansion of the ‘Book of Legends’ coming to life. As he explains “We don’t dig up the cobblestones in Pilsen square, we peel them back because they’re made of paper. We don’t tunnel down a hole made of dirt, we tear holes in the thickly bound pages of the book, representative of different rock strata.”
While the paper work was exclusively filmed in stop motion, using a Canon 7D for the filming and Stop Motion Pro as the capture medium, some of the effects where done using hand drawn cells, including the patches of text from the proclamation of intent that appear on the rooftops of the paper town and storm clouds overhead.
Chris and his team used motion control to make 16 repeat passes over the town and field they created. The footage was then composited together in Adobe After Effects. The town was created using a kind of hand-made parchment called Khadi, which Chris describes as “more like thin carpet than thick paper. It’s incredably durable and keeps its texture even in the long shots”
However, the scene where the wheat and barley in the field blooms was “a different sort of monster.” The field was originally built in its entirety, using a Japanese paper called Kozo. Then the piece was shot backwards, cutting away the set, to be viewed forwards, giving the impression the flowers are growing.
Chris was originally approached by The Bank who run Pilsner Urquell’s marketing campaigns.
