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Grad's Ad is Out of this World Grad's Ad is Out of this World
14 July

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Grad's Ad is Out of this World!

A Bournemouth graduate has made the record books by creating the least expensive advert ever broadcast on UK television screens as well as making the first advert beamed into space.

John Addis, who graduated with a BA (Hons) in Television Production in 2007, won a competition sponsored by Doritos.

The campaign with the tagline 'You make it, we play it' asked consumers to create a 30-second advert and upload it onto their website. Doritos offered a prize of £20,000 for the best advert made. Over 900 entries were received with five finalists selected – and then it was up to the public to decide.

John, and his friend Matt Bowron, won the vote much to their delight. Their advert was partly inspired by the Tom Hanks film Joe Versus the Volcano and used a stop-motion filming technique to create the advert named Tribe showing a ‘tribe’ of Doritos sacrificing one lone Dorito. The cost of advert was a mere £6.50 – the cost of two packets of big Doritos, two pots of salsa, and Blu-tack.

"The idea came about simply because we knew we wanted to do a stop-frame animation with the crisps themselves and we started working from that," explained John, who is currently working as a runner/edit assistant at a production company.

"The initial plan was to have different flavours of crisps coming out of two bags and having a mini war but that would've probably taken too long and been potentially pretty confusing. We retained the idea of the crisps being a tribe, however, and decided a sacrifice would be simpler and easier to read without any dialogue."

"Winning the competition was genuinely a huge shock because the other finalists were so professionally put together. Our advert had a much more home made feel to it and was shot on a shoestring of £6.50, which covered the crisps, salsa, and blu-tack. Apparently it's going to be in the Guiness World Records as the cheapest advert ever broadcast on UK television which is pretty funny."

The Doritos commercial is scheduled to run across commercial TV until June 30 and was also broadcast into space on Friday 13 June from a radar from the Eiscat Space Centre in Svalbard, Norway, which is normally used to study the atmosphere and northern lights.

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