Platypus Productions’ Ian Chuter behind Woolworths ad campaign promoting Masterchef

Ornico CEO Oresti Patricios picked the MasterChef campaign as his Ad of the Week on influential marketing and advertising website, MarkLives.com.Calling the spots “a delight to watch,” Oresti wrote, “Beautifully filmed, brilliantly edited, yet simple and uncluttered to watch – these ads are delicious … The food shots are mainly about perfect lighting and creative use of slow-motion. But the producers have gone a subtle step further with this ad, using a combination of slow-motion and jump-cut style animation techniques to create visual puns and micro-stories, supported by a rhythmical soundtrack that provides motivation for exciting edit points.”

Platypus used a different approach to the usual commercials set-up. “We worked with a very small but highly-skilled crew,” he says. “This allowed us to be very flexible on set and be more instinctive. It created space and meant we could be very collaborative; the final result is a real team effort between us, Woolworths’ agency creative director Fred Benistant and food stylist Maranda Engelbrecht.”

For the campaign about Woolworths’ Good Business Journey, Chuter used an even smaller three-man crew, shooting around South Africa and Tanzania. “Woolworths wanted something that was completely authentic, to reflect their genuine commitment to sustainability, so there’s absolutely no art direction to romanticise the process; we shot things as they were. We even attached GoPro3s to cows and workers and conveyor belts to make it as candid as possible.”

Platypus provided a full-service creative solution on both campaigns, handling the direction, production and postproduction in-house.