Bringing Chobani’s “Giving Tree” to Life

Nathan Love recently unveiled its latest large-scale brand collaboration with Chobani, and is enjoying nation-wide rollout of the campaign over the next three weeks! The 30 second TV ad is the first of over a dozen animations NL created for Chobani’s 10th anniversary celebration. This release coincides with Chobani distributing one free yogurt to everyone in the US as a way of thanking customers for their support.

Partnering with the in-house creative and marketing team at Chobani, Nathan Love worked with illustrator Aitch to create the ‘Giving Tree’ motif that’s central to the campaign.

Design Development
From Building Blocks to Full Compositions

As Aitch established how every individual element was illustrated, we worked out the layout and how it would work in motion. Much of this workflow happened in parallel as one part of the process informed the other.

Aitch Design Elements

Storyboard Frames

Styleframes

To adapt Aitch’s technique to film, the artists and producers at ANL, led by Director Anca Risca, used a mix of techniques, including hand-drawn illustrations, traditional 2D cel animation and 3D computer animation, to add texture and depth to the imagery.

A Variety of Animation Styles 
Brought Together As One

The little girl was one of the major elements approached in a 2D animated style, in order to preserve the quirks of her unique design. We animated her in flat color, and then developed different effects and textures to achieve the desired look.

For other elements, we manipulated Aitch’s illustrations directly, using puppetting techniques. The majority of the flowers adorning the scenes were animated in this way. This peach branch is one of our earliest tests for this approach.

CG elements were rendered and developed separately to share the same watercolor look. We chose to create the entire fruit picking scene in CG, to instill the sense of depth and dimension as the camera passes through the branches.

Lastly, all of these elements were brought together to create each scene.

Nathan Love delivered broadcast TV spots, as well as short online animated videos and digital ads, all of which displayed the classic storybook style of Aitch’s work. In the spot, a young girl, holding a Chobani yogurt container, plants a seed in the ground and watches as it turns into a magnificent, arching tree, offering up fruits of all kinds. In the online videos, the story continues to more yogurt being distributed across national landmarks by various means. The style and imagery that anchors the TV spot is seen across all elements of the integrated campaign, from digital and mobile through to coupons and point of sales.