Two Cape Town companies, advertising agency FoxP2 and animation studio Masters & Savant Worldwide Cape Town have teamed up to produce a new commercial for Freshpak tea that integrates art and animation.

“While the story of the commercial is unqiue in itself, the manner in which it was produced places this commercial in league of its own”, says FoxP2 Creative Director Andrew Whitehouse.

Briefed to create a television commercial (that could be extended into print media), which positioned Freshpak as the tea that offers consumers a calm moment, or ‘Me Moment’ during stressful days, the ad also had to appeal to the tea’s primary target audience; health conscious, youthful, intelligent women who need to find a quiet calm moment during their busy days.

“We decided to show our heroine during moments of her day when she has to deal with the typical moments of pressure and stress, be they from her boss, children, traffic, deadlines, or anything else,” says Whitehouse.

“While this could have been achieved using a traditional live action shoot, we opted for a unique creative approach, using one of the most labour intensive animation / commercial production procedures – stop frame animation – because we wanted to use tea leaves to create the end image that the audience would see. Using stop frame animation we could create a commercial where everything could literally be made up of tea leaves,“ says Whitehouse.

Knowing the demands of stop frame animation, FoxP2 approached the Cape Town branch of animation studio Masters & Savant Worldwide.

Says Masters & Savant Wordwide Cape Town MD Reto Reolon, “The production process of this project was very exciting for us in that the sequence was completed by hand, while traditionally most of our work is.