From the creator:
The tactility of the world we created for UnitedHealth Group makes our hearts sing and epitomizes everything we love to do here at Scholar. Balancing textured, practically shot footage with simple, narrative animation made for a clever and charming campaign. It feels both fresh and ownable, and honestly, we cannot wait to do another project just like this. Zebra NYC’s scripts immediately resonated and got us feverishly developing out the storyline. We obsessed over our characters and their personalities. Who were they and what was their history? How does United apply to them? And what are the tools available to us to tell the tale, we wondered? Collaborating with stop motion studio Open The Portal, we immediately set about sourcing all our practical props and building the contraptions and gadgets that allowed for perfect framing, lensing and camera placement. Through detailed storyboarding and preliminary animation tests, we were able to figure out how our 2D characters would seamlessly interact with our live action footage.
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Production Company: Scholar
Directors: William Campbell & Will Johnson
Executive Producer: Christina Roldan
Head of Production: Rachel Kaminek
Art Director: Sarah Beth Hulver
Producer: Nikki Maniolas
Designers: JP Rooney, Stephanie Davidson, Joshua Harvey, Sarah-Beth Hulver, Gunnar Peterson
Cel Animators: Matthew Everton, Harry Teitelman, Taik Lee
2D Animators: Matt Andrews, Henry Pak, Andrew Tan, Ryan Kaplan, Jonathan Moore
Stop-Motion Production Company: Open the Portal
Client: UnitedHealth Group
Agency: The Glover Park Group/Zebra
Agency Creative Producer: Annie Bishop
Agency Executive Producer: Linda Rafoss