101 and Royle Get Crabs for Zoopla

As the old phrase goes, never work with children, puppets, or hermit crabs wearing model houses as shells. 101, working with Royle Productions, have braved the latter in Crabworld.

Directed by Augusto Sola (through Riff Raff,) the ad saw hermit crabs moving shells, each of which was an intricately designed and partly 3D-printed model that incorporated a house around the spiral shells already favoured by the hermit crabs.

As such, the production came with some unique challenges. How could you get the crabs to naturally move into these shells without harming them in any way? How to herd the crabs to get them to follow even moderately close to the storyboards? How to make a shell partly made of 3D printed plastic look authentic on a real beach? However, as a behind the scenes video by Zoopla shows, they were able to achieve all they wanted to do thanks to a team of modelmakers, a crab handler, and one of David Attenborough's Planet Earth cameramen.

Royle's head of production Sarah Marcon said of the project, “it was a pleasure to work with 101 again following on from the Costa campaign we collaborated on last year. Throughout the project, Gus (Sola) was immensely passionate about the idea.”

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