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Oct 2008

!!!Cream Advertising Award Nomination!!!

Happy Hour gets a Cream Advertising nominated in the Best TV / Cinema Advertising Campaign Category for the Wessex Water series of tv commercials. The final awards are announced on 6th Nov...watch this space for more news.

Sep 2008

More animals galore.

As the first Petplan TV commercial airs, the second in the series goes into production. Using a custom built big blue chair, and a revolving platform, we filmed another 2 days of cats, dogs and lovely people.

Aug 2008

They say dont work with children and animals!

The first in a series of tv commercials for Petplan Insurance involved both children and animals...lots of animals.
Set in a photo booth, we had to deal with numerous cats, dogs and children.

Dawn French provided the voice over, and what a lovely lady she was too.

 

July 2008

Hampson Success at Farnborough

Hampson Aerospace CEO personally congratulates HappyHour's team for a job well done. With its 5 x 60" plasma screens, the 2 storey stand at Farnborough Air Show certainly turned heads and created a buzz about the aerospace engineering company.

 

June 2008

Hampson #2 Aerospace Film

Happy Hour films additional footage and create's a brand new exhibition film for Hampson Group, creating a new look to suit the company's new direction for a second year in a row. Filming this year took Happy Hour to Detroit and their manufacturing sites in Utica and Lake Orion, in addition to the sites at Wigan and Birmingham.

 

May 2008

Wessex Water #2 - TV Commercial

Filming takes place for the Summer Wessex Water TV commercial, over 2 days at a picturesque somerset lakeside location.
With lots of special fx shots and almost 40 crew and 20 cast to organise, Happy Hour's production team create some innovative solutions instead of using very time-demanding motion control shots!!!

Only 4 weeks of post production to create the Special FX...

 

April 2008

 

 

Mar 2008

Wessex Water #1 - TV Commercial

Filming takes place in a Bristol studio for the first in series of comemrcials for Wessex Water. Shot on 35mm, the magical commercial tells the tale of a team of technicians who freeze time and carry out there work under our very noses. After all, if we saw everything they did, they wouldn't be doing their jobs!

 

Feb 2008

International Association of Cancer Research

Thats AICR to the rest of us. Happy Hour, for charity agency DMS, begin working on 3 videos for the reputable Cancer Research charity.

 

Jan 2008

Animating financial histories

Happy Hour produce a 13 minute animated documentary charting the history of the financial sector in the UK.

 

Dec 2007

Happyhour produce a series of web commercials for P&O Cruises, in partnership with the creative team at Entire DM.

 

Nov 2007

Vernons.com - the animation commercial for the online gaming site goes into full swing.

 

Oct 2007

Westfield Health TV

Happy Hour go back into the white studio to take on dancers, footballers and lots of other legs for Westfield Health's TV commercial.

 

Sep 2007

AGM Meetings

Nationwide commission Happy Hour to make their all important AGM film, involving the new Chairman of th society discussing the recent merger with the Portman Buidling Society.

Lloyds

The 2 x Lloyds animationed films come to an end on schedule and on budget. The client is delighted with the final rendered look. The films go to dupe ready for their Oct roll out.

 

Aug 2007

Taking Peugeot 407's for a spin

Happy Hour film the new 407 range on turntables for digital agency E3 Media. The rigerous and highly technical post production involved compositing the cars into a new environment. Shot at 60fps on Vericam HD to provide full flexibility to time remap the cars to stop at any point, HH's post production team also rotascope the cars FRAME by FRAME to allow them to seemlessly be placed into the new environment.

 

July 2007

Animation testing begins on the Lloyds TSB data risk animation films, whilst an aimated TV ad for Halos n Horns also goes into production.

 

June 2007

As scriptwriting & modelling begins on the Lloyds productions, the Happy Hour animation team work on the Vernons.com TV commercial.

The live action team begin working on the Time Out Pad TV commercial shoot.

Hampson film goes to Farnborough Air Show to a very warm reception. The clients had no idea it was going to be so good.

 

May 2007

Animating inaminate objects...

Lloyds TSB commission Happy Hour to produce 2 x 8 minute animated films for their internal communications and training, covering the subject of data risk and fraud.

KWAI TV commercial

Kwai garlic tablets, odour free and good for the heart...thats the message behind this 1 day shoot commercial, shot on location in the south west.

April 2007

Hampson Aerospace filming finishes and sorting the material begins...

Happy Hour film across 3 continents for Hampson Aerospace, covering every possible type of machining, stretch forming, tooling and wing assembly and construction. Some items were so secret the cameraman had to work blindfolded.

 

Mar 2007

Triple award winning evening for Happy Hour at the2007 IVCA Awards

'Valuing Everyone' - a 7 minute animated internal communication video for Nationwide Building Society, picked up Gold in both nominated categories. In addition, it went on to win the final Grand Prix Award at the end of the evening. Read the full press release...

Feb 2007

Debtbusters TV Commercial, Kwai TV Commercial go into production

Jan 2007

Wedclick TV Commercial and Enercon corporate film go into production

An online wedding planning service gets the animated TV commercial treatment, while w gear up to film the induction process of cap sealing for Enercon Industries.

Dec 2006

Skills Train TV Commercial

A series of commercials for Skills Train goes into production. based on the Quit Your Job theme, we setup several scenarios that include empty warehouses, offices, and filming at a single platform train station.

Nov 2006

Tarka in Raindance

Our music video ‘Get on Down’ produced for the Tarka Groove Experiment has been accept by this years RAINDANCE festival and will be shown at 12 noon on Sat 7th Oct.
For those of you who don’t know RAINDANCE Britain’s equivalent to the SUNDANCE festival in the States and on of the prestigious events going, so if you want to meet us, we’ll be there!

The Children’s Society commercial gets the go ahead

We have just gone in to pre-production on a series of commercials for the children society. The commercials are DR and feature homeless children who have run away from home and trying to live on the streets. Part of the commercial will touch upon child prostitution and part of our challenge to shoot it in such away it will get the final commercial approved by BACC for pre 7pm showings.

Oct 2006

Tarka in Raindance

Our music video ‘Get on Down’ produced for the Tarka Groove Experiment has been accept by this years RAINDANCE festival and will be shown at 12 noon on Sat 7th Oct.
For those of you who don’t know RAINDANCE Britain’s equivalent to the SUNDANCE festival in the States and on of the prestigious events going, so if you want to meet us, we’ll be there!

The Children’s Society commercial gets the go ahead

We have just gone in to pre-production on a series of commercials for the children society. The commercials are DR and feature homeless children who have run away from home and trying to live on the streets. Part of the commercial will touch upon child prostitution and part of our challenge to shoot it in such away it will get the final commercial approved by BACC for pre 7pm showings.

Sept 2006

Never work with Animals - again!

We have now just delivered the final animated film promoting Diversity in the work place for the Nationwide Building society. We interviewed several members of staff who had particular issues, disability, race, illness, sexuality and age. We cut their answers down to about 8 minutes and animated animal character to the voices. The intention was to not directly reveal the issues faced by the interviewees, and see if the viewers impression of the staff animals in the film were altered once their real-world counterparts were revealed at the end. When it was shown to the staff members on their Diversity day it was received very well……over 50 emails to the internal communications department… well!

July 2006

Nationwide come back and get a drenching!

After the success of the AGM video nationwide asked us to produce an internal video for staff members to promote a new home insurance product they were about to launch.

We build a set in a studio and proceeded to wreck it. Fire, water, electrocutions, shattering glass - a fun day. Except for Catherine who had to spend most of the day wet….. Sorry Catherine.

Add The Geoffrey Palmer as the voice over artist, and the final production hits all the points it had to.

June 2006

Central Capital comes back for more

After the production of their ‘Normal’ series of commercials we have produced Central Capital’s next commercials. ‘Newsreader’ is, predictably enough, set in a news studio. We filmed our actor against green screen at BBC Cardiff in their virtual reality studio, adding in our own studio set in post. The campaign needed 14 different phone numbers for the different TV stations it was to be shown on. Our actors had to say the same thing, exactly the same way, in exactly 21 seconds, fourteen times! A job far above and beyond a typical newsreader’s challenge. It worked a treat!

May 2006

Out of Happy Hour, comes After Hours films!

We’ve just celebrated the launch of After Hours Films, the arm of the company that produces music videos. Leaving Happy Hour to produce the commercials and communication films we do so well!!

Go on, have a look… Click here www.afterhoursfilms.co.uk

Getting people to vote…..NATIONWIDE!

Nationwide Building Society asked us to come up with an internal video to their members - basically anyone who has an account with them - to vote in their annual AGM. So we can up with The X-Factor meets Fame Academy meets Matt Allwright, to get staff members to encourage customers and members to use their vote. It went down very well, the voters went up, and their target of increasing the votes cast from 600,000 to 1,000,000 this year was achieved…..if you’re reading this Mr. Blair feel free to give us a call!!!!

Tarka gets rolled out to the World!

It's finished, and it looks great! We’re really pleased with it, the band are really, really pleased with it. They are just working on their first album with a release date in Sept 2006.

Feb 2006

Heads on Spikes….in music video OUTRAGE!!!

Not literally, it’s just the next stage of the Tarka Groove Experiment video ‘Get on Down’ after weeks of frantic planning and story boarding we got into the blue screen studio to shoot the band, and all we needed was their heads!

Armed with loads of body paint and blue suits we spent a long day filming them the blue screen studio so that we had the right angles and movements to fit onto the animated bodies already prepared by out top animator Matt Pitt. Crowds of 2D animated characters from throughout history will get in on the act, creating a crazed romp through pop culture.

Jan 2006

Is it ‘Normal’ to take a film crew 50 ft down a cave to shoot a commercial?

In the freezing weather of January and cursed by a -15C wind chill factor we were given the task of filming two commercials for WWAV Bristol and their clients Central Capital entitled ‘Normal’.

A man in speedos clambering out of a lake (while the crew stood around in thermals and several layers), Morris dancing between snow flurries, and 50ft down a cave on the Mendips.

Shot on Super 16mm by our very talented Mr. Christopher Maris the finished commercials look great, and if you want to see how the clients felt about, have a look at the testimonials on our clients page.