RSPCA

Every year, the RSPCA sees a spike in animal abandonment reports around Christmas, sometimes up to 25% more. To raise awareness and encourage donations, the RSPCA launched a cross-media campaign covering DOOH, direct mail, and digital, aimed at reaching as many people as possible when they are most in demand.

The campaign idea was to try and blur the boundary between screen and reality by showing a sad-looking dog pawing at the screen, as if it were trapped inside the ad space, trying to escape.

My role seemed straightforward in principle. I was simply going to take the footage shot by a production company, key out the dog from the background and then deliver the animated final outputs. Unfortunately the production company ran into some issues; the dog didn’t behave and so they never got the shots they needed, and from an editing perspective, the footage hadn’t been shot in a controlled environment;  no green screen and no clean background to key out the dog.

So the creative director and I improvised (and he really earned the 'creative' in 'creative director'). We filmed his dog Guille against a glass patio door, with a white sheet pegged onto a washing line behind him to create some separation. We managed to get something that was usable, it wasn’t perfect, but after a lot of keying, finessing, and problem-solving, we made it work. And Guille was the goodest boy.