“Love Food, Hate Waste” TV Campaign for UKTV

I had great fun designing the costumes for a new UKTV campaign in collaboration with the charity “Love Food, Hate Waste”, all to promote less waste in our homes.

It was an incredibly interesting brief – the director wanted to bring Fruits and Vegetables to life as if they lived in their own reality as we do now. Wearing clothes, going to work and going out to get “wasted”(get the link there… drunk/wasted fruits and veg, to encourage us humans not to waste!).

The first big decision was to choose our hero fruits and vegetables. This was based on both the visuals of the piece of fruit or vegetable (as a costume what would work the best), then the other factor was which food items are more commonly wasted.

So I started to put together some initial mood boards and then these developed into the first round of costume sketches for the chosen line up – just so the client and production team could get some visuals and ideas of how these costumes could take shape.

As this was a technically a commercial for a charity the budget wasn’t huge. We knew we had to make this work with limited funds and resources. So this was something I had to take into consideration when designing. Not to offer something that was going to be impossible to turn around within our budget and time frame.

I treated the design process in a similar manner as I would for any mascot costume, but the difference was with these costumes we wanted them to feel as life like as possible. So hiding as many seams and human features as possible. So for example, looking at ways we could disguise or hide the hole in which the actors face would appear out of. After several discussions regarding budget and production we all agreed the most efficient way of doing it was a blend of costume design with CGI in the edit.

So between myself and my makers at Robert Allsopp & Associates we devised how to keep our actors faces as tightly locked to the circumference of the face holes as possible. Hoods were added to each costume which matched the colour of the fruit or vegetable so that if the actors faces ever did manage to pull away, you would only ever see fabric rather than any gaps or shadows.

As you can imagine, the construction process for something like this is quite lengthy. We had limited fittings with our cast, so fortunately some of the team were happy to step in as stand ins!

The initial phase involves building the base structures, so you begin to get an idea of the form and shape. Then once happy these bases are fabricated and sprayed, texturised & detailed. Toiles are made of the outfits - these are mocks up of the actual garments to allow you to draft a pattern and see how the pieces will look.

The fabric buying for this project was crucial as we wanted to try and subtly emulate the look of each fruit and vegetable, so for the corn we chose this fabulous elephant corduroy in the perfect corn husk green. Although it was trickier to find than anticipated.

I wanted the Broccoli to be in a green trench coat, which could be treated and painted to blend in with the look of the stem of the broccoli. I had a vision of he strawberry being quite sassy, so my design was for them to be in a juicy couture style velour tracksuit, with a gold piping detail and strawberry style embellishments. I thought the texture of the velour would emulate that of a strawberry quite well. The banana was meant to be dressed for bed and just casually putting their bins out late at night. So I actually found some excellent striped banana yellow pyjamas in Uniqlo which worked perfect, I brought 3 pairs which we adapted to fit a the huge banana body. then we blended two tones of yellow fleece to try to create the look of the banana skin.

As the final pieces were made and we fitted the actors for the last time everything was coming together really well. The only major change/addition was that we realised that all the costumes needed further padding added to their base layers. This was to really emphasise the fruit and veg like shapes of the costumes - as I mentioned earlier, we really to hide any human elements. So the further padded helped to disguise knee bends, elbows etc.

Once finished the the costumes were packed and ready for the shoot day!

We shot the commercial one evening running into the early hours of the next morning. Luckily the weather held up, and so did the actors! (trust me, its so easy task performing in these style mascot costumes - especially when they are shaped like fruits and vegetables). If you haven’t already go take a look at the commercial and there are some stills from the promo below. Also if you head to my instagram @patrickjack - you can see some behind the scenes shots from the build and construction process.

Happy watching!

Thanks for reading!

Px