Aardman Sells Persil Laundry Detergent With A Short, ‘Monster Stains’

Aardman Animations is jumping into the long-form animation advertising trend with their latest campaign for Unilever’s laundry brand, Persil. The Bristol, U.K. studio created a two-minute-fifteen-second short called Monster Stains, which premiered in cinemas and online last week.

The images in the promotional film were created using 28 common household stains, including gravy, jam, grass, and chocolate ice cream:

The campaign, conceived by ad agency Ogilvy, also includes five shorter pieces featuring the same stain-monsters. The production process for this project was cumbersome, to say the least. The main short, which has 60 seconds of animation, took a team of ten artists almost three months to complete. The method, according to Aardman, involved “painting a single frame of animation on a shirt, photographing it, washing the shirt clean with Persil, drying it, ironing it, and preparing it for the next frame of animation to be painted on.” This process was repeated for a total of 2,576 washes, after which all the photos were stitched together to create the animation.

“These entertaining films bring a whole new slant to the traditional laundry product demo and the idea that where there’s a stain, there’s a story,” said James Hayhurst, brand equity director. “The characters capture the fun-loving spirit of the ‘Dirt Is Good’ brand philosophy and the short form content is a perfect way to connect with our consumers on their mobile devices and in the e-commerce environment.”

Artists credits for the spot weren’t provided to us, but Merlin Crossingham served as the creative director at Aardman. At Ogilvy, Andre Laurentino was the executive creative director, and Johnny Watters and Angus George were the creative directors. Kode Media produced, shot, and edited all of the live-action elements in the project.

Aardman provided us with some behind-the-scenes photo of the production: