Would you like a receipt? This clever Co-op animated ad uses a printer to get its message across

Receipts. In this cashless day and age, with the rise of contactless tapping and online banking, they’ve become way less of a thing. Once slapped in your hand alongside your change, more often than not, they now end up hanging from the self-serve checkout or crushed up and flung in a bin (unless you’ve got a meal bill to split between your mates, that is). However, this unremarkable piece of the everyday has become the central focus of a clever campaign for the Co-op, which sees their fresh brand messaging animated via an actual printer, using the old-school tech to reflect the lasting and reliable values of the Co-op Group.

The new campaign, Owned by You. Right By You., is devised by the Co-op‘s creative agency VCCP London. It aims to draw attention to the fact that the Co-op is one of the UK’s first successful consumer cooperatives; it was founded in the 19th century and was “based on the notion of ethical trading and the belief that the profits of the business should be shared amongst members according to their purchases,” says a press release. It also follows a survey that revealed that 50 percent of consumers didn’t know what it means when a business is a co-operative and news that the new Labour government will make larger contributions to cooperatives. “At Co-op, we have been proudly delivering a different way of doing business for 180 years. Now is the time to champion the co-operative model and demonstrate how it provides a solution to many of the challenges we face today,” says Kenyatte Nelson, chief membership and customer officer at Co-op Group.

VCCP’s content creation studio Girl&Bear collaborated with the production studio Blinkink and director Sam Gainsborough to create the advert with a papery twist. The brief presented to Sam and Blinkink featured the core concept of having the animation appearing on a receipt, an idea Sam gelled with instantly. “I was excited by the initial idea as I knew receipts were made of thermal paper – which when you heat can create beautiful smokey textures,” Sam says.

This initial idea eventually brought Sam’s mind to the land of watercolour and ink painted stop-motion, and the team developed, and eventually honed the style by printing many tests through the printer. “It was incredibly satisfying to quickly discover that the receipt printers created really interesting results,” says Sam. “It was very successful at printing hard blacks or whites, however, any subtle greys would mean the printer created Xs, dots and other icons. This glitchy confusion in the printing led to the final style. The inky designs we created would print very digitally and full of errors which made a really cool end look.”

The process behind actually creating the animation was both tricky and time-consuming. First off, everything was animated digitally, frame by frame, for which the Blinkink team worked alongside a team of animators led by Reg Isaac. In tandem with receipt-like text – which corresponds with the voiceover – and a series of abstract glitchy letters, dots and icons, the animation also transforms into more fully fleshed figures and scenes. It was then all tied together with the painstaking process of physically printing every frame through a printer, which was then shot in stop-motion with the help of animation filmmakers Daniel Quirke, Honor Price and Ross Stringer. “Every frame of the film is literally a receipt – just like the one scrunched up in your pocket,” says Sam.

On the whole, the trickiest point of the whole project was actually figuring out the best course of action, all within a pretty tight deadline. “It was incredibly lucky to discover that the receipt printer printed incredibly rapidly – which meant we knew early on that there would be a chance of making this film in-camera,” says Sam. “It’s always a joy when you get to do these things for real!” The project didn’t come without its casualties, however – sadly, during the course of production, one brave printer was lost after it overheated and packed it in.