BlinkInk’s Renee Zhan directs new ad ‘The Gooniverse Factory’ for Trolli
Skwigly
Blinkink’s Renee Zhan welcomes you to the “Gooniverse”. A factory of imagination and decapitation, where Sour Brite Crawlers are turned into delicious goo to be injected into their brethren.
In Blink’s fourth collaboration with Wieden & Kennedy Portland for Trolli, Renee creates a marvellous musical madness for the brand’s new product, SOUR BURSTIN’ CRAWLERS.
It’s been 0 days since the last incident at this factory. The conveyor belts jam and SOUR BURSTIN’ CRAWLERS are injected so much they burst. The factory machines just can’t resist the tasty looking worms and they slurp one up when they think no one is looking. It’s gory gooey madness and mayhem in the Trolli Factory. Meanwhile, the worms are all singing happily as if this is the best day of their lives.
Renee’s vision was to really push the darkness, humour, and music throughout. By pushing the terrifying setting of the factory, she was able to hilariously contrast the happy brightly-coloured singing worms. The silly rhyming lyrics really helped push the absurdism and hilarity of the piece to the extreme.
Working with Saurus Animation, an award-winning CG studio in Norway, the weird and wonderful world of Trolli was recreated via CG with realistic stop-motion textures to achieve a handmade feeling. The world of tactile 3D was a new avenue for Renee, having previously never worked in this technique before. However, her incredible eye for design birthed a truly one-of-a-kind look and feel for Trolli.
Renee shared her thoughts:
I’ve been a fan of Trolli for years (both the ads and the worms!) so it was a dream come true to be approached with this script. I loved the idea of a terrifying factory filled with happily singing worms who are thrilled to be ground up into goo and injected into other worms.
We wanted to build on the fun characters and irreverent tone created by Becky and Joe and Sam Gainsborough on previous campaigns. For this project, we also wanted to create a really expansive world. We drew on inspiration from films like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to create a fun yet terrifying environment.
Character designer Ewa Luczkow designed the factory machines and concept artists Xavier Rem and Clément Danveau created background matte paintings. We worked with Saurus Animation to create realistic textures and a handcrafted feel for the factory and the worms. I love the Trolli universe (or GOOniverse as we called it) which is full of weird and offbeat humour.
See more of the work of Renee Zhan at blinkink.co.uk