Starting in 1824, and seamlessly making our way through the decades to modern day. Every single element of the production design was carefully crafted to subtly shift in time whilst ensuring we kept the heartfelt story of generosity intact.

The film shows a single act of generosity played out seamlessly as 200 years pass. A young girl ventures into a corner shop for the first time, wanting to surprise her mum with a bar of Cadbury Dairy Milk for her birthday.

The shopkeeper, noticing that the girl is attempting to pay with her favourite toys, kindly plays along, giving the girl the chocolate bar. The film was created to show how even though much has changed over the last 200 years, the generous spirit in people has always remained the same.

Cadbury is a British national treasure. It’s the biggest chocolate maker in Britain and has been loved for generations. It was founded in 1824 with the opening of a store on Bull Street in Birmingham. Run on the belief that, ‘nothing is too good for the public’, it is this emphasis on generosity that continues to make Cadbury the beloved brand that it is today.

The brand has been rooted in British culture for generations, but how could we demonstrate our relationship with the public and our brand value that got us to this bicentennial anniversary? Through the retelling of a story known and loved by the nation. The universally understood relationship between child and mother, showing ‘generous instinct’ has always been there. The founding value of Cadbury 200 years ago.

In recreating the advert, the VFX team faced the huge challenge - that the young actress was now six years older and looked completely different. AI was used as part of a layered approach to the compositing to help match the original actresses age and performance. We re-comped key features from our original girl’s face over an AI image as she moved through 200 years of history. In this way, the job combined new technologies with classic compositing.

After stabilising the old and new footage we trained an AI face-replacement tool on the original girl’s face. However, this only took us part of the way - key features such as the eyes and mouth still required a combination of classic VFX techniques. All whilst the ad seamlessly moved through the decades and backgrounds were matte painted to faithfully recreate Britain from the past.