How Burberry started an alien invasion

Burberry has released their third campaign in collaboration with Riff Raff, once again pushing the boundaries of short film production to the extreme. 

Night Creatures is an ambitiously choreographed, sci-fi spot that brings to life a passionate and poetic dance between three Burberry-clad characters, and an extraordinarily animated, extraterrestrial creature. 

We got together with Megaforce, the team of directors behind this remarkable feat, to discuss alien aesthetics, the practicalities of working with rigs and robots on the streets of London, and the importance of creating a campaign that challenged social issues.  

We wanted to celebrate an open minded attitude when facing the unknown.

Can you talk us through how the concept for the film developed?

Every Burberry film we've made has evolved from a reaction to the news and the desire to make a statement in a poetic way. The first ad, Festive, made in 2020, was a reaction to the Covid situation and the racial tensions happening. So we decided to make something that expressed resilience through adversity and the power of the collective. 

Open Spaces was made during the end of the lockdown. We wanted to express the need for freedom and a connection to nature. Night Creatures was a reaction to the rise of xenophobia and close mindedness in general. We wanted to celebrate an open minded attitude when facing the unknown.

Your last ad, Open Spaces, also stars gravity-defying characters. How did its creative process help you when it came to making Night Creatures?

Open Spaces was our first time exploring how dancers could play with gravity. We learned how to combine stunts, wire, and dancers to achieve the movements we had in mind. This experience definitely helped us to explore the use of wire further in Night Creatures. 

In Open Spaces, the wire rigging had to be removed in post to be completely invisible. However, Night Creatures is about a creature puppeteering dancers in the air, so we wanted to be able to see the rigging systems, as it will be replaced by a CGI tentacle. Because of this, we also ended up exploring a lot of new exciting techniques rather than using the one we already knew.

What was the design process for the creature like? Were there any particular aesthetic inspirations?  What’s its significance in the story?

Our first ideas were inspired by sea anemones, because the tentacles seemed like a good way to create interesting interactions with the dancers. We also had in mind the monster from the movie The Host, and the angels in the anime series Evangelion.

We then sat with Stephane Levallois, a great character designer and after a few hours of chatting and sketching we came out with this giant, triangle-based, weird squid mixed with an enoki mushroom type creature. As it was supposed to represent the unknown, we liked that it was hard to tell where it came from. It could be a sea creature, an alien or even a strange tree.  

We knew that to achieve something that looks tangible we had to create a real choreography with practical SFX like wires and motorised robots.

How did (LA)HORDE, the choreographers, and The Mill, the animators, collaborate to create such a perfectly synchronised dance between the characters and the creature?

Actually, thanks to our experience with the former films, we knew that to achieve something that looks realistic, we had to combine real choreography with practical SFX like wires and motorised robots. 

It was important that the dancers’ movements look incredibly real. While we were developing that, we had to figure out in advance how the “tentacles” and the creature could act and move logically and naturally. Then the CGI animators, The Mill, achieved an amazing job bringing that to life.

The soundtracks play an integral role in the storytelling of Burberry spots. Can you tell us about how you chose the music?

As we were referencing to the idea of a blockbuster movie, we first explored more intense and powerful tracks until we tried some more quiet tracks, and discovered that the contrast between these and the powerful imagery was more unexpected. It left more space for the sound design too. 

We finally found Celebration by Yom, which brought a unique feeling, and levelled up the whole choreography in an emotional and poetic way.

Bringing some massive crane trucks in a wheat field or blocking a central London road crossing for four nights requires the same kind of production magic tricks.

The spot is very cinematic and has some apocalyptic sci-fi vibes, what inspired this?

The original brief from Burberry was to create something very cinematic. We had to come up with a concept that felt like a continuation of the former two campaigns, which led us to the idea of creating something that the characters would battle against. 

Going through different ideas, we agreed on this giant monster. So the sci-fi vibe came logically after this process.

Your last film with Burberry took you to the countryside and Night Creatures brought you back to the city, how did filming in the two locations differ?

Somehow it’s quite similar. The three films we have made for Burberry take place in some pretty everyday environments, which creates a sense of surprise when they leave reality. But an everyday location doesn’t mean it’s a simple place to shoot, working with so much wire. 

Bringing some massive crane trucks in a wheat field or blocking off a central London road crossing for four nights requires the same kind of production magic tricks.