This dazzling advert for The Great British Bake Off blends stop motion with food photography

The Great British Bake Off might be Britain’s most beloved television show. The baking competition has featured hundreds of cast members, including celebrities and children, with several iterations created for charities like Comic Relief and Stand up to Cancer. Mostly, all of the fun of the TV show is in the amateur bakers, who lead to hilarious muck-ups or pull off amazing cake sculptures. So, how does the 16th season deliver on a decade and a half of primetime television? Of course, the incredibly reliable Blinkink step in with a stop-motion advert about the beginning of all time, also known as the “bakening”, fronted by the brilliant Isabel Garrett.

Beginning with an egg yolk flying like a comet through a dark void, a cosmic swirl is created, then sprinkled with flour before berries drop into its primordial liquid, breaking the illusion. It’s stop motion meets food aesthetics, which seems like a match made in heaven, though that didn’t stop the process from being pretty chaotic, and improvisation was key. “Maybe unsurprisingly food and stop motion don’t normally go well together, so we had to do a bit of figuring out as to what we could make with real food and what needed to be inedible,” says Isabel. “In the end the main set was built with more solid materials like foam, sculpts of cakes and so on, with piped colourful icing details on top to make it look nice and edible.”

As the ad continues an animated segment made out of powdered frosting depicts the literal evolution of the show’s hosts Noel Fielding and Alison Hammond, from tadpole to mop-topped gorilla. The process was done in a few stages – first, the sequence was digitally animated by Nelly Michenaud in 2D, then stencils were created from them, and David McShane animated each frame over different slabs of sponge cake. The level of fun in this trailer comes naturally from animators who love Bake Off and its undeniable charm. “It’s a very wholesome bunch of people baking lovely things in a tent, but it’s also so dramatic and there’s so much tension when things go wrong, or when Paul and Prue roam around watching silently,” says Isabel. “I wanted to get the contrast of those two thing – big and epic but also very down to earth and fun, just celebrating the simple joy of baking.”

Translating skills learned from working with clients such as Coldplay, Whiskas, and Darbo, Isabel brought honed skills in conceptual coherence and blending of different medias to the pot. Mixing stop motion, 2D animation, live-action, and strange abstract food photography together was no small feat, but her experience on Coldplay’s 🌈 ('ALiEN HiTS/ALiEN RADiO') and the animation team gave her the confidence to lead the audacious ad. “There are too many other wonderful collaborators to list, but everyone really did such a brilliant job on this,” says Isabel.