Short of the Week

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Adventure Johnny Kelly

Back to the Start

Branded Content for Chipotle, this short animation from RCA-grad Johnny Kelly uses stop-mo, clean designs and Willie Nelson (!) to tell a touching story of sustainable agriculture.

Play
Adventure Johnny Kelly

Back to the Start

Branded Content for Chipotle, this short animation from RCA-grad Johnny Kelly uses stop-mo, clean designs and Willie Nelson (!) to tell a touching story of sustainable agriculture.

Back to the Start

Directed By Johnny Kelly
Produced By Nexus Productions
Made In UK

Johnny Kelly graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2007 and his diploma film, Procrastination, made quite a splash online a couple of years back. Nowadays he’s more into commercial gigs via London’s esteemed Nexus Productions, but of course that doesn’t preclude creating work of high artistic value. Case in point, his new short animation for the Chipotle fast food chain is stellar on most every level, and is one of my favorite branded content pieces of the year.

Chipotle touts themselves as top of the industry in terms of environmental impact and promotion of sustainable farming technique. Kelly’s piece very eloquently dramatizes the story of a farmer who abandons his small farming practices in favor of impersonal technologies of scale. But, a crisis of conscience takes hold and the farmer opts to return to his low-impact ways. All the while, Willie Nelson is singing a cover of Coldplay’s “The Scientist”, you know the one that goes “…I’m going back to the start”. Cute, succinct, and a solid match to Chipotle’s brand philosophies. Overall a winning piece. There is now a cool timelapse of the project creation up on Vimeo, so check it out as well.