UKTV has launched a new advertising campaign that features global icon Cher appearing in clips from some of the broadcaster’s best-known shows.
Cher makes a surprise appearance in programmes such as Secrets of the London Underground, Masterchef, classic EastEnders and Mad Men.
The TV commercial was developed by UKTV’s in-house creative agency in partnership with HunkyDory Films, and led by Scott Russell, UKTV’s creative director. It has been released to promote the launch of U, the broadcaster’s new masterbrand.
The idea for the advert began with the aim of highlighting UKTV’s variety of programmes – and originally was going to feature a ewe singing Sonny and Cher’s classic, I Got You Babe.
“I was chatting to the senior producer Leanne Farleigh, and I said, what about we get Cher to turn up in the shows?” Russell tells TVBEurope, “and it ends with the shot of her in the Queen Vic singing Karaoke with Barry from EastEnders. Because just that image of the two of them together would be crazy.”
After pitching it to Cher’s management, the team had a couple of days to work with the singer while she was on a trip to Europe.
Curated clips
All of UKTV’s content is digitised and so the production team searched the broadcaster’s media asset management system Curator to find the clips they wanted to include in the ad. Those clips needed to have either a space or someone that could be removed in order to add Cher to the picture.
“Everyone was working on Curator to find clips and then adding them to a shared project,” explains Russell. “Then the editor and director would look and choose the ones they thought would work.”
Some of the clips were actually recreated in order to get around licensing issues, including the sequence with Orlando Bloom. “We sent it to Jimmy Carr who turned up and did a rerecord on his voice,” adds Russell.
Once all the rights were signed off, Cher arrived on set. “She was there for six hours and we had every set-up ready and we just kept moving her around,” Russell continues. “She was so good. You would expect her to be ‘Cher’, suddenly being in a studio in West London with all these props, like we got a MasterChef apron made for her to wear with her name on it. Everyone was saying to me, she won’t do that Scott, but she just said, fine, no problem.
“We were only getting probably two or three takes of everything with Cher. It was a case of set-up and move on, and she was just hanging out on set chatting to everybody. She was super friendly.”
One set-up saw Cher climb into a car rig so that she could appear alongside Chris Kamara and Jeff Stelling in World’s Most Dangerous Roads. “That’s one of my favourite shots,” says Russell, “and she was just in the back of this shaking his car. I said, that’s no way it’s going to match up, but it did perfectly straight away.”
Visual effects trickery
Once Cher’s footage was shot, it was overlayed onto the original with any characters that were not needed rotoscoped out. For example, the original MasterChef clip features a real contestant walking up to the judges. In the advert, that person has been painted out and replaced by Cher. “There was a lot of visual effects trickery,” adds Russell. “On the Orlando Bloom shot, where he’s sat on top of a rock, we had to recreate that camera move from a certain distance. So it was super, super technical.
Once filming and post production were complete, Russell sent the finished ad to Cher’s management for approval. “It came back with no changes,” he says, “which was mindblowing because the Red Dwarf one was when we ran out of time. We had a green screen of Cher signing the song but it hadn’t been lit. So I said, why don’t we make her a hologram and everyone said, you can’t put an H on Cher’s head, but she completely signed that off.”
