The advert debuted during the season finale of Downton Abbey. Thousands of viewers across Britain saw it marking the end of a weekend of television packed with the Christmas adverts from major retailers, including John Lewis, Marks & Spencer, Argos and Asda.
The Christmas advert is the most talked about commercial advert in the UK. John Munro, CEO of Immersive, comments: "During a visit to the US, I experienced the whirlwind around Super Bowl adverts . . . it seems like the UK has always had the same kind of passion for our Christmas campaigns."
The 60-second Tesco advert shows Christmas lights being switched on in households and Tesco stores as the build up to the moment when more than 800 local Wigan residents experience the sparkling winter wonderland.
The lighthearted approach to the advert embraced the comedy that often accompanies such Christmas stunts, making it a real treat for the Immersive crew. "It is not often that humour is used on a project of this scale," says John Munro. He considers the crowds' priceless reactions the biggest highlight from working on the project.
Producing the event in half of the ordinary timescale for such a large-scale installation was hard work, requiring 36 crew working on-site around the clock, but for John Munro this was not the biggest challenge.
"We often work on huge scales to short deadlines and live audiences, so this project came with the usual set of challenges that we often come across and are used to; but a new and surprising challenge for us was to take our high-end 3D animation team and get them to think in terms of 2/3 frame animations to create very traditional minimal looking Christmas decoration animation. We kept having to pull back our ideas and styles to make them fit in with the aesthetic. It's funny how creating simple a simple look and feel can often be quite challenging."
(Jim Evans)
