2014 Winners & Shortlists

Brief Explanation

Egyptian housewives tend to be very proud of their cooking and the secret recipes that make homemade dinners thrive above all other alternatives. In fact, most women owned kitchen playhouses as kids; they’d have make belief tea parties and pretend to throw massive dinners. With Ganna we thought we could use this insight to address our target audience by giving them an ad they could easily connect and identify with. Using a real-life mockup of a kitchen playhouse and an actual kitchen we portrayed the Egyptian housewife at the top of her game completely dominating her field of expertise. Showing both the child and the fully-grown woman doing her thing with absolute ease all comes down to the secret recipe used, Ganna.

Creative Execution

With a very insightful concept, the challenge was bringing it all to life in the most impressive way possible. The easy way to translate the concept on screen would be to use 3D graphics for all the "playhouse" shots, but we wanted the crafting to stand out and be memorable for viewers. So we tackled this concept using the special and visual effects from the years before 3D technology started replacing all practical effects. Reality always looks better than digital image of the intended outcome and so we used miniatures and mockups to create our ad. Building the set rather than digitally creating it is more time consuming which is why CGI is taking over. However, with a budget of over 3.5 million Egyptian pounds, we were fortunate to participate with a production house that had previously worked on similar projects. When we contacted them, they told us that nothing like this had ever been done before, but they could pull it off. So gave them a go ahead to start building the sets, both the real sets and the mirroring miniature sets. The physicality of it all was very important for the universal need for physical objects in a world that has gone digital is more than just an act of nostalgia; it's a predilection. However, once both the actual set and the replica miniature kitchen were created we faced another challenge. Since our ad required the merge of both the real kitchen and the playhouse kitchen in a visually interesting way, the playhouse kitchen actually had to work like a real kitchen. So we made sure the miniature ovens, tea pots and every single item within the miniature replica was working properly the way it would in reality. Even the miniature food had to be actual miniature food that mixed and felt true to life. That meant the oven could heat a tiny meal, the lights inside a fridge flicked open whenever the door was pulled open and so on. Staying faithful to the script we didn't compromise in the initial story board we had in mind and made it all work. Some visual effects were used to compliment the crafting of our miniatures. However, the vast majority of it all was real. A special camera with a unique lens had to be used to film all the miniature scenes and each time we shot a miniature scene we had to mimic every camera move on the real set, so that the transitions from the playhouse to the grown-up kitchen became seamless and unnoticeable to the human eye. At the end, the physical dimensions of our story helped make this ad as true to life as possible.