The craft to make the cream.

Personally, I often find it really refreshing to see the reality behind a creative process. So many times I’ve tied myself up by admiring from afar the great work of other creative teams and awed at how they might have got to where they got to. To then look at the work I create a feel somehow insignificant.

Which is why I’ve decided to create a series of behind the project pieces to show the reality and brutal honesty of what happens in the work I create with the people I create it with.

The first of this series is one of my favourite and tastiest pieces… The Milk Maids brand awareness campaign.

It always starts with a sketch

We knew that when it came to promoting Milk Maids we knew that we needed to pull on what makes their ice-cream so well-loved and so delicious. This had to be the family farm, with access to their Aryshire cows just a field away from their shop.

Creating connections is what I believe makes great work stick. Taking a visual approach, I wanted find the connection to combine the elements of the cows that make the milk with the ice cream Milk Maids sell. The idea came through the drips of a strawberry ice cream to create the udders of a cow. Sweet right?!

Making a lot of mess

For me this project was one which once I started I wanted to see it through, even if that meant a lot of experimentation along the way. It’s worth noting that, up until this point I’d gotten pretty good at getting an idea down on paper (something I’d worked long and hard on) but sometimes found it tricky to actually execute those ideas, which in turn end up in a sketchbook graveyard — who knows you may see some of these resurrected in good time.

Initially I called on LittleMark, a good friend who had previously worked at Absolute as a photographer before going freelance. Instincts at this stage told me photography would be the best route to go down.

We took the time out one weekend to experiment making fake ice cream — yes you can do that — and dripping pink paint off baby potatoes to create udders.

Safe to say the end result wasn’t looking too promising. We did capture the second image of the campaign on the day though (ice cream scoop udders) and my first starring role in an ad campaign as a hand model.

It could’ve been my lack-lustre attempt at a comp of the udders or just knowing when you need to re-think the approach you’re taking, but we assessed the image created from the shoot and decided to change tact. Here’s where I learnt the importance of making mistakes and really doing an idea justice by crafting it properly. That meant bringing in the big guns.

Back to the drawing board

Thankfully we knew the right guy to help us create our cow’s udders. We’d worked with Gary Roylance on a couple of retouching projects and knew of his capabilities but never worked with him on a 3D project at this stage, first time for everything right?!

Thankfully Gary got the idea and knew what we wanted to do. Moodboards and another round of sketches helped us both get into our heads the aesthetic we wanted to achieve for the udders.

The craft to make the cream

With both parties understanding the vision we started work on creating the 3D ice cream udder. Gary talked us through every step of the process and collaborated with us to get to where we needed to.

Once we’d gotten the udder into a good place we started to create the add visual. From the get go I envisioned the udder on a sky background during this process we did experiment with how ‘real’ the udder needed to feel.

Discussions in the Absolute studio let us to a less is more approach. Stripping back the unnecessary parts and leaving only what you need to give the audience that smile in the mind moment.

The sprinkles on top of the cone

Simplified visual in place, but what was really missing was a killer campaign line. One which, in a nutshell, helped the audience make their own connection with our idea.

Joe Coleman was the man for the job here. He had the wonderful ability to see the line staring us right in the face. A line synonymous with the brand name and one which summed up the message perfectly.