To celebrate Subway’s sponsorship of The Big Bang Theory, McCann approached us to create a series of stop motion TV idents.

The brief was to bring together the two worlds of Subway and The Big Bang Theory in four idents. These would be shown before, during and after each episode which was aired on E4 – Channel 4’s sister channel.

We have also worked with Subway on their Sub of The Day commercial and their sponsorship of the NFL London Games so it was fun to work together again.

pencil storyboard subway rocket
pencil storyboard planets
pencil pre production subway planets
Making something for a comedy has to be fun and with this in mind, we got to work with the creatives at McCann London.
We considered food imagery and the company colours to make sure the two brands were represented visually. Together we came up with four distinct ideas that were consistently a celebration of Subway’s fresh ingredients and the quirky humour that the The Big Bang Theory is known for.

Having landed on the concepts the next step was to create animatics. These help to figure out the timing and framing of each scene. These also dictated what we would need to make ahead of time to ensure we were prepared for the shoot days.

This is where our art department took the spotlight. We prepared the scenes, chose backgrounds and made the props we would need based on the animatics. We also worked with a food stylist to make sure the ingredients looked the best they could on screen. We shot all four idents in two weeks.

Subway tomato test
Subway tomato
Subway rocket on the glass BTS
Peeriodic table BTS
Subway Rocket Still

Once filming was finalised we edited and colour graded the footage in-house. The sound was taken care of by Craft, a McCann sound editing team – a true collaborative effort.

Lettuce and chilli in space blue screen Lettuce and chilli in space post

Periodic

Galaxy

Classroom

Rocket Science

Credits

Client: Subway

Agency: McCann London

Director of Photography: Peter Ellmore

Gaffer: Jonathan Yates

Directed and Produced: Picturesmith

Food Stylists: Rob Morris and Jack Sargeson