iD is a flexible mobile network which allows people to change their plan to suit them as their circumstances change.
One of the key aspects of Home and Away is the exaggerated way that people change back and forth. Some disappear, reappear, disappear again. Love interests change constantly. Bad boys become good, and good boys bad. So our idea was to celebrate the changeable nature of the people in the show and thus highlight the link with iD’s USP.
The art direction chosen for this was to set the stories in a universe of Barbie and Ken like dolls. The reason for this, conceptually, was a tongue-in-cheek nod to the fact that there’s something unreal and artificial about the world of Home & Away. Because our characters were inspired by characters and archetypes from the tv show, we also felt that using real actors would confuse things whereas using dolls would allow us to focus on the humour of the scenarios.
From a production budget point of view, it also meant that we could produce more videos than live action with actors would have allowed.
We modified dolls to suit Home and Away archetypes of bad boys, handsome doctors etc, and created reusable sets where the action would unfold. We shot a mix of live action and stop motion with the dolls, and added special effects in post-production. We created full tiny sets for the dolls so that their world felt slick and detailed, and filmed them with beautiful lighting and a shallow depth of field to offset the simple staging with an assured and polished production values. A backprojected scene added movement and depth with sky and beach scenes and added to the production value of the finished stings.
We brought the iD green into each of the scenes in a subtle way, such as the blanket in our hospital sting, or the surfboard on the beach. This allowed us to introduce the brand in a way that felt natural, rather than forced. For the VO of the dolls we chose Australian comedian Damien Clarke and had him do both male and female voices to add humour to the skits and suggest that the fate of our characters is out of their hands.
We created teaser posts for social media as well as posting all of the stings for our fans to view.
