3D Scanners UK offer assistance in Comic Relief's 'Clash of Comics' Marketing Campaign.
3D Scanners UK help create a giant replica of comedian Jimmy Carr's head using the latest 3D scanning technology, for Walkers Crisps' "Clash of Comics" Comic Relief campaign.
Working initially from their 10ft garden shed, Michelle and Lee Moore have turned their business, Hero Prop Design Ltd, into a great success. Michelle and Lee started 15 years ago creating replica items and character costumes from films and supplying to companies such as Asda for use in promotional work, in addition to collectors. With the development of Ebay, sales increased dramatically allowing them to take on more work and buy better equipment.
Michelle and Lee’s ‘big break’ came when they were cast as extras in the film 'Act of Grace', where they also agreed to supply props. As word got around, they continued to supply props to the film and television industry, gaining a great reputation and expanding their team.
Lyn Hewitson, creative director at Walkers Crisps, approached Hero Prop Design Ltd offering them an incredible opportunity to get involved in their latest television marketing campaign 'Clash of the Comics', to help raise money for the forthcoming Comic Relief 2011.
Comedians Jimmy Carr, Frank Skinner, Al Murray, Stephen Fry would be taking part in this campaign, each having their own new flavour of crisps and competing to sell the most for Red Nose Day. Walkers would donate 5 pence to the charity for each packet of crisps sold. The forfeit for the three losing comedians was a body wax from a mystery celebrity!
Hero Prop Design Ltd were asked if they could provide the costumes for the campaign - a roast chicken, a pie tank and a giant Jimmy Carr head! With the filming date being only 6 weeks away, Michelle and Lee knew that they had very little time to create the models and, as a result, turned to 3D Scanners UK to help speed up their process.
Michelle realised that the quickest way possible to create an up-scaled version of something, was to 3D scan the object and have a CNC milled part created from the data. Unfortunately, the giant head was being made as a surprise to Jimmy Carr, so his head could not be scanned. This delayed the project a little, as it meant that Michelle had to sculpt Jimmy's head out of clay from two photographs. 3D Scanners UK then scanned the 'drying out' clay model, and set to work processing the data straight way.
The point cloud data from the scan was initially organised and best fit aligned to select the best points for creating the most accurate model possible. The data was then meshed.
Once the polygon mesh was cleaned, trimmed back and optimised it was then scaled up to 4 metres high.
Once cleaned, the model was machined. The machining was carried out by Mark Angus at 3D CNC on a CMS 5 axis Aries machine. The head was made of 23 sections of polystyrene, which all needed to be glued together and carefully trimmed back once it was back at Hero Prop Designs.
It took 9 hours to transport the models from Manchester (where Hero Prop Design is based) to the chosen filming location in Kingston.
Filming went to plan & the television advert was ready for release, in the run up to Comic Relief on 18th March 2011.
