You may have come across our cute Latitude Homes Kiwi?! He made his recent debut across TV on Demand, YouTube and social channels on April 1st. Well, here's a little bit about him and the journey he went on.
THE IDEA
It all began with Marc Hunter, our CEO wanting to take Latitude Homes national with a TV ad. But to get this idea started he approached our marketing and design company Smokeylemon. "We've had the pleasure of working with the team at Smokeylemon from 2017 when we rebranded and have continued to build our brand with them."
In order to cut through the clutter, we (Smokeylemon) knew we had to come up with a concept that would make people fall in love with the brand. If we had based the ad on home features, build promises or celebrity endorsements all we would've been doing is wasting our client's money advertising the idea of “home building” rather than the stronger concept of giving Latitude Homes a meaningful connection to people’s desire to build a home.” Smokeylemon Creative Director Ross Bennett says.
Here at Latitude Homes, we have a core belief ‘that every Kiwi should be able to afford a brand new home,' and around this concept is where the loveable and slightly vulnerable kiwi concept was brought to life.
CONCEPT BROUGHT TO LIFE
Now with the concept created and the idea storyboarded, it was time to speak with animation studios. “There is some fantastic talent out there in terms of both filmmaking and animation in New Zealand, in the end, we chose to contract The Rig to take our story and bring it to life.” Ross Bennett.
The Rig is a small but perfectly formed animation company based in Auckland. They were right on board with the concept and their art director Glen Atkins added some great additions to the story to help carry the motion and tempo of the ad. 30 secs is a very short time to tell a story so every split second counts. Glen’s added direction and scene location suggestions really helped to convey the emotion of the story.
The Rig carried out all of the animation and live filming, compositing the two together perfectly and oversaw the sound direction in conjunction with the sound team at Factory Studios.