A Sad Tail with a happy ending…

Oliver Agency working on behalf of The AA, reached out to us last year to create a range of “expressive” characters to use as part of an online awareness campaign.

So what’s the story? During Covid lockdowns, many owners neglected their cars in terms of service and maintenance. The AA wanted to raise awareness and highlight this fact by personifying the sadness from neglect that the cars “felt”. They chose to represent this using small toy accessories commonly found inside the cars.

The Designworks team were tasked in a short timeframe to create and develop a number of character designs based around nodding dogs, bobbleheads and rear-view mirror toys. The challenge was to make them recognisable, look sad and neglected without making the viewer feel too guilty. The chosen two characters, a sad nodding dog and a sad hanging alien ornament were sketched, realised in digital sculpted form, 3D printed and finished to look like authentic toys, albeit with a slightly less happy outlook than normal.

“A career first for me... commissioning a hand crafted 3D model for a photoshoot. This little guy was created by the experts at Designworks Windsor Ltd and I think you'll agree, he pulls at the heartstrings!!

Nicola Bhojani - Head of Marketing - Driver Products

As well as creating products across a range of industries stretching from toys to consumer products through to medical devices and everything in between, we love this type of challenge here at Designworks and the process was anything but sad! We had great fun creating these little guys.

Take a look at the photos below to see these two characters took shape and eventually realised into fully working photoshoot props.