Parabella

0:00This guy. Great. Thank you very much. So, yes, my name is Mikey, please. I'm one half of Parabella.

0:10We're an animation directing duo repped by Blinkink in London. And, yeah, we were tasked with the job of cushioning the public between the and the the audience. And, yeah, we were tasked with the job of cushioning the public between the transition from the warm, cozy bosom of the BBC into the edgy commercial talons of Channel 4, the most loved show on British Telly. So, yeah, so we did this massive, big, baking extravaganza as a little poster. And when we first got the job we didn't get, they didn't got to give it to us.

1:02We had to pitch over months. My girlfriend was like, you know how, like, what a hot potato that is. You're going to get a lot of stuff from people. People are really angry, like, she was really angry about it. And I was like, ah, it's fine. We're going to do, like, baking cakes. Everyone's going to love it. What could possibly, what could possibly go wrong? I mean, I think it's, the process of making it was in itself an enormous challenge, but nothing would prepare me for what came next. So, I'm just going to show stuff just by showing it, so you can all kind of watch it in its beautiful, positive, positive light and then talk a little bit about the stuff that happened afterwards. Okay, so here it is. Oh, I have to press it again. Mm-mm. Bon Bon, bon. Rainbow blue sink or swim a ring is certain we'll never get in.

2:08Side by side band in band we'll all stand together. Play the game. Find the fight What's the point of a beautiful life? All in all, back in that yellow... ...Stand together! We all stand together! Set your egg timers. The Great British take off his back. Coming soon on Channel 4. Alright, so here I am smugly dusting off after a job well done. It was a very, very messy production and we got, you know, I got very dirty. And so a couple of weeks later, I mean it was a really quick turnaround once we were actually making the thing. I was sitting down, like nice and relaxed, feeding my son some mashed potato. And it was about lunchtime and I was like, oh, it came out at 12. I wonder how it's gone down. Because it had been nothing but like a wonderful positive experience, like everyone.

3:30We made the lady who owned the house that it's filmed in. She cried when she saw it. She was like, my little show, it's just like a wonderful, wonderful, like warm feeling all around.

3:41So I was like, oh, this is going to be great. Everyone's going to love it. And it's just trending on Twitter. Not in a good way. And then, you know when you Google news stories and all the headlines pop up along the thing. Creepy and fans divided and lash out. First creepy look.

4:06And then this is my favorite. I mean the mass hysteria. Mass hysteria. So you can imagine like, you know, the sort of potato sliding off the spoon and my face going, why? And being like, oh God, like I'm never ever going to work again.

4:24This is the end. Spoiler alert is fine. It was all fine. Everything kind of turned out okay. But not as bad as Prulith's spoiler. She let loose who won the bake off earlier. I'm going to flash slide that later, but it'll just be so quick. Who won? You won't even notice. No, I'm not going to do that. That would be horrible. So straight to my first, you know, it's like Willy Wonk's Fetchery if it was in hell. Which I only just noticed say she's got a blue tick, which means she's an authoritative voice. Anyway, she had it absolutely spot on.

5:06We did start thinking this is a page from our treatment. Willy Wonk her in hell.

5:11Now we started in some very, very strange places. We all we really knew is that we wanted to make a bakey mation. And we just were with the team at Ford Creative kind of looking for that thing that is the kind of incaps. He likes the spirit of Britain and baking. And obviously these wicked photo montages weren't quite hitting it. Another thing.

5:37So we were conscious of like, well, we don't want to like upset people.

5:45This is a great one. And eventually we kind of we got to this beautiful idea.

5:51This is a drawing by Brianie May Smith, which we which I look back on now. We kind of dismissed it in the trip. You know, it didn't make it into the final ad.

5:59But I look at this now and I think, yes, that's it.

6:01That's the thing we were trying to do, which is about things coming together, be they ingredients or people and what comes out of it is something greater. Something greater than the sum of its parts. And that is kind of, you know, what baking is and the act of baking bringing people together. And I just think that really sums it up. No, I love I actually love that drawing. And so once once we'd kind of got that spine to our film, we started getting our hands dirty kind of as soon as soon as we could. It took us a long time to like find that track and figure out the structure.

6:40We did me and my brother wrote some songs. We like recorded them really awfully loads of stuff. I won't tell you about those. Yeah, we baked lots of stuff. And yeah, we're not we're not like, I don't know, well, if you're unfamiliar with that other work, we're not food specialists. Like this isn't what we do. We're just kind of character animators, but we were tasked with making this thing that was completely out of edible stuff.

7:09So we were like, okay, great. Well, that's like one thing you're really not meant to do. You know, it's like working with animals and children. If you're in live action filming, you don't work with stuff that's going to like rot or get eaten by mice or fall apart, all the stuff that happened. And don't animate through flower, which is what we're doing. Why are we here? What's life all about?

7:35Is God really real? Or is there some doubt? Okay, so it's all done for real, which clearly went past Kino, Kino Pictor. Not amused by good content. It actually was, so yeah, like absolutely loads of R&D, just messing about. Quite a few of the ideas that finally didn't need to be on that really. Quite a few of the ideas that actually made onto screen were like, we had put stuff in our animatic that just wasn't really possible.

8:14So we were figuring out things on set as well.

8:17So these like great, great fun testing things, which is like part of the joy of stop motion animation and doing these rules that every, well, every shot in this was a little challenge. Again, things we'd sort of just put in the animatic because it was like a nice idea that symbolized two things coming together and being a bit more positive at the end of it. We're actually really frustratingly hard to do.

8:41So this is one of the early tests of like the buttocks rising. It didn't really work.

8:47So we ended up doing like hundreds of these things. And we found that, interesting little fact, that if you put different degrees of yeast spread out throughout the thing, the buttocks rise in this like really beautiful way that staggers off.

9:03But there are a lot of poor baked people that fell by the wayside. Is this our, yeah, this is the test reel.

9:14So these are, this is basically it. Mine is the good stuff.

9:24So yeah, oh, this had to go, that shot had to go by the standards division of Channel 4 because it was too pornographic, which is fair.

9:34But we made it, it made it through. Yeah, it's really sweet. So everything was a little challenged at each shot was just like another task, another like problem, a big myriad of problems. Is there a good one coming up? Which, which just took a lot of figuring out. So one of one of the worst problems and one of the ideas that we felt like symbolize this thing so well were the croissants holding hands. And we're just like, yes, like that is it. Like that was the first one we got. And we're like, that's what we're trying to do.

10:15But it turns out getting croissants to touch hands is really hard. So what we ended up doing was building this incredibly complex rig where we'd wired all the NASA lie. I actually just did that just for just for tonight.

10:29We didn't do that. It turns out if you if you turn croissants upside down, they do it naturally.

10:36So they're meant to do that. And so, but that took us probably thousands of pounds worth of experimenting to figure that out. Again, wonderful dough experiments.

10:48This is my sort of my favorite test reel. The preferred test obviously didn't didn't make it in. Oh, yeah, this is sort of what was in the animatic. And it just it looks nice idea, but in reality, it's rubbish.

11:06So we just sort of played around with all these all these great fun tests. I kind of wish the film was just this, to be honest. I feel like I feel like we wouldn't have got trolled so hard. If it was just that, let it play out. It's a really nice one. Oh, yeah, so actually, so what we ended up doing is basically a mixture between the two, these two rising kind of old, old, old lady things.

11:48We weren't allowed to do that. Which is a shame. So again, now I want to vomit. So drew fence. Well, that's exactly what we wanted to do too. There's actually four vomit shots in the in the ad because we felt this was one of the justifications in the meeting for this was that baking doesn't always go right like real life, you know, things for the future.

12:17So we're all apart and mistakes are just as much part of the process as as the successes.

12:25So these are little. I might not go all the way through this. I'm running. I'm over time already.

12:35So anyway, it was actually really hard to get things to puke on Q. So hence the introduction of the haunted animator. Which was which was an absolute dream to get to get those guys to puke the only instruction on the box. And I'm not kidding. Apart from the word like animator on it was this. That's all that's all it came with. That was the only thing on the box. Poor cock mufflers now going to have nightmares for weeks, which segues quite neatly into one of my mind of my brother's favorite pastimes at Christmas is decorating my mom's cake, despite her protests.

13:21So this this didn't make it into the pitch into the pitch document, but I did show the creatives later. It's just like another direction that we could go. And they're not cool with it. So apparently the actual stuff of nightmares according to according to Jen, but she's wrong. She's wrong. It's the stuff of dreams.

13:40It's it was such a dream project. I really kind of restored my faith in a lot of kind of working in in advertising. I had just a really wonderful time doing it. So, you know, we got to make this giant kind of totem to Britain and all its sort of wonderful diversity and and make try to make it a big kind of celebration of British culture. You know, with a myriad of beautiful baked things that it'll come together, tromping up this giant lolling tongue to a granted a monstrous demonic cake at the top, which which eats them. But as a small, small detail.

14:22So yeah, we had about two weeks to make this entire thing. Again, we had gone through a lot of stuff before.

14:30So we'd kind of break it all down into little bits and all edible, completely edible, maybe a bit salty, but technically edible. Fancy baking techniques. The lion got slated for using the lion, but we thought it was a nice thing. Yeah, so so this is this was our sort of incredible thing that we managed to do in a couple of weeks. All the meringues, real meringues, at least they were. It's the one that's actually not real meringues. Me and my girlfriend kind of cooked them over one weekend and then on set they all sort of melted and driveled off the wire.

15:11So it's so you have to pretend in the end. And I'll just show a quick brief making of it's about a minute and a half long. I'm going to put it in side by side and in hand we all stand together. Play the game, fight the fight. One wants the point on a beautiful night. On and on and in hand we all stand together. On and on and in hand we all stand together.

16:57So this is my favorite one. So back to that morning when I just like was like, oh, this is going to be so great. You know, usually animation feedback is like, man, I love the water effects. But today was that day was obviously very different. And I called up the creators of Channel 4 and was like, is this the end? You know, and they're like, no, don't worry about me.

17:20No, it's brilliant. It's the best thing that's ever happened. I can't believe it. You know, they obviously thrilled. They knew it was happening. No one had just sort of told me expect expect some pain apart from my girlfriend. He had warned me at the beginning, but I hadn't really listened.

17:34So yeah, really, really wonderful, wonderful project. Sad face to happy faces. There we go. And we can now kind of draw the evening to an end just by flipping the projector onto the Bake Off final and just kind of watching it together as one big happy family. No, that's it really. Thank you very much. Cheers. Thank you.