Guldkorn

This TV commercial for OTA Guldkorn (a Danish cereal product) is one of two 30 sec films produced by A. Film and Jørgen Klubien (Klubien Animation) in 1991. I did about half of the rough animation, some of which was re-used between the two films.

The video of film #2 above is grabbed from a 24 years old VHS tape, de-interlaced and cleaned-up to the best of my ability. I only animated the middle part of the film, that is shots 3, 4, 5 and 6. The rest was animated by former Valhalla animator Henning Nielsen. I don't seem to have a final soundtrack for it, so I left it with just the music.

Here is a modelsheet of the teddy bear and a background layout for one of the shots, both drawn by Jørgen Klubien.

It was on this production I first saw Thomas Dreyer's beautiful background artwork. I was impressed with how he manages to make the objects very solid and tangible (which goes well with the solid cel animation) while still keeping quite a rough painting style. The background in the cel setup below is a good example.

Cel setup from Guldkorn commercial with color xerox of the BG.

As you can see, Jørgen left the bg layout pretty loose and somewhat open to interpretation. Ideally, there should have been a match-line on the layout along the train track to indicate the exact position of the rails. The result of this small communication gaffe was that Thomas got the track far too wide for the size of the train. My desperate solution was to match the train's left wheels to the front rail in the animation and just hope that no one would notice!

Since I met Thomas Dreyer on this production, I have called on him every time I ever needed a background painter, such as for this Christmas TV ad for BR Toys (and here and here and here).

The rough animation keys below are from the main shot of the second film, where the teddy feeds the train a puffy wheat grain, containing just enough energy to jump the fallen tree.

Unfortunately I couldn't find the engine's pistons which are pumping on ones (on a separate level) at the end of the shot. But here is a pencil test of the main animation.

In addition to the two TV commercials, the computer game "Guldkorn Expressen"
was produced. Check it out on YouTube.

Cover of 'Guldkorn-Expressen' (C64 version).

Isn't it just wonderfully retro...!

Update: Now you can download and play the PC version of the game on danskedosklassikere.blogspot.dk, which is dedicated to preserving classic Danish DOS games. To play the game on modern Windows systems you need to install the DOS emulator DOSbox. Alternatively, you can play it online here.

The game was also made for the Amiga and Commodore 64, and seems to contain some stills and even a bit of animation from the commercials. Here you can see the cover of the game, which is based on a frame from the same shot as the cel setup above.