Jolly Rancher ‘Hatching’ | Team Interview

The Jolly Rancher brand tasked us with launching their new Jolly Rancher Gummies, which were formulated to have the same bold, fruit-flavor taste as the original Jolly Rancher hard candies. This led us to create a series of videos that illustrate fantastical origin stories of Jolly Rancher Gummies as they spawn directly from the iconic hard candies. The campaign features amusing videos to run on TV, digital and social media.

Director, Lisha Tan, comments “‘Jolly Rancher’s ‘Hatching’ is a magical hybrid of live-action and VFX work. For the live action-shoot, we cast a cheeky bunch of teenagers to be in the commercial and interact with our ‘gummy gang’. The set decorator built the kitchen of my dreams! The lighting was a key element in this spot; we had to light the window as if there was the natural morning light coming through, in order for the candies to change into their gummy form. To get the movement of the gummy gang synchronized, we attached a bit of fishing wire to the plate and moved it along to the audio on set. I also had printouts of the gang at the proper scale and placed them in each shot for reference. At the studio, we replaced the practical candies with their adorable CG character counterparts, which were developed by the great Henry Deleon.”

CG Lead, Monique Espinoza, adds “We had an amazing group of artists working on Jolly Rancher, who had five independent and unique characters to animate! These characters didn’t talk, so they needed to express feelings through body language and facial animation. Because of the schedule, this job had a very unique 2D and 3D rig set up that made it quicker to create and animate the characters. The unique 2D facial rig produced displacement maps that allowed a lot of freedom to whatever kind of face or expression we wanted to give to each particular character. It also gave the characters a very stylized stop motion look. I think it added to the highly critical cuteness factor!”