Playing keeps us creative. We’ve always been chock-full of new ideas, so we teamed up with the talented folk at Animade to create, direct and produce Hey Pressto.

A party bursting out of a leg, a game of tennis over a bare bum crack and a nipple going for a stroll – it’s not your everyday brief. We teamed up with our friends at Animade to combine our skills in 3D printing, stop motion and digital animation. Using actors’ skin as a canvas, this innovative passion project is truly one of a kind.

It took four months of R&D to get the right kind of stamp. Once we were happy with the quality, we directed the films with our friend, DOP stop motion wizard Malcolm Hadley. Huge thanks to all eight cast members who let us push stamps all over their body for three days.

The creative teams at DBLG and Animade spent time together developing ideas around fun things we could do with various body parts, such as nipples, bum cracks, belly buttons. 

After a lot of tea, biscuits and brainstorming we eventually narrowed it down to 5 animations that would form, Light Bulb, Nipple Walk, Sneeze, Tennis and Party.

Filming at Clapham Road Studios, we split the shoot in to two sets. Shooting simultaneously, men on one side and women on the other, meant we could save time as we had to wait up to 40 mins between each frame to give the skin to recover. You can see on the film that Frank our oldest cast member’s skin wasn’t as elastic as the other cast members so there is an echo of the previous frames of the animation.

After filming DBLG edited the footage in to loops and graded in house. Throughout the process we worked with closely audio creative agency Mutant Jukebox who created bespoke composition and sound design for the films.