The McDonalds - Made of Love "Beef" gave us the the opportunity to create a world of miniature characters which came alive in the real world. So we created a world made of paper combined with the magic of stop motion. Pretty much everything was built by hand. It was exciting to imagine a whole world come to life on a McDonald's tray. The fun figures made of paper emanate a handmade charm. They fold and unfold magically before our eyes and take us on the journey of a Big Mag production.

The McDonalds - Made of Love Spot is a combination of live action, motion control and stop motion. Pretty much everything was built by hand. Some puppets were made out of paper. For some puppets we used 3D printing.

For the realization we had a team of 65 people, shot 2 days live action and 20 days stop motion. Total production time was eight weeks including pre and post production.

There was one tricky camera move at the beginning. Camera moves from the actress to the counter following the tray and the farmyard starts folding out. With this shot we dive into the stop motion world. We were dealing with choreographed acting for the opening shot with a motion control system, matching light, field of view & depth of field for the live action and stop motion parts and scaling the whole move 2.5 times up since our stop motion world was built in a different scale to make it animatable.

The other thing about this long and tricky shot was that we only had one go. There was no room for error. We built the farmyard to the last camera position and animated backwards – destroying the whole set. The animators did a superb job.

For all the other shots, we built a special rig for the tray. So we could match the changing light of live action plates where we walk through the store.