The Balvenie set out to bring its packaging to life on television. The distinctive papercut style of the brand’s design needed to carry into a CGI stop-frame TV ad, telling the story behind one of its single malts in a way that still felt handmade.
The brief was a twenty-five-second narrative for a TV audience, following the blending of the whisky from the master blender’s careful hand through each selected ingredient and scent, building to a final scene that captures its rich flavour notes.
Frantic worked with the artist agency Grand Matter and renowned papercraft artist Owen Gildersleeve, whose work the film was built to honour. The challenge was to capture the intricate detail of real papercraft inside a fully digital production.
To do the artist’s vision justice, Frantic went deep into the world of papercraft, replicating the look and feel of real paper and card in meticulous detail. Every element in the animation was first designed and cut for real by Owen Gildersleeve for a live-action stills shoot.
Those physical pieces became the reference. Frantic scanned a range of paper textures and layered them into the digital materials, so each 3D object carried the grain, weight and slight imperfection of the real thing, the qualities a default CGI surface tends to miss.
Every element was built to feel as tactile as possible, an experience that is visually captivating and echoes the depth and quality of the whisky itself. Modelling and animation of all scenes were created in Cinema 4D, with rendering handled in Redshift on the studio’s onsite renderfarm.
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Creative Director, The Balvenie
The finished ad gave The Balvenie a television spot that stays true to the handcrafted character of its packaging, translating a physical art form into motion without losing the warmth that makes it work.
It also stands as proof of a particular Frantic strength: taking a real-world craft, papercraft here, and rebuilding it in CGI so faithfully that the seams disappear, a capability that suits any brand with a tactile, design-led identity to protect.
