NATHAN JOYCE / MOTHER / RESCUE REMEDY

Rescuerama - a TikTok series for Rescue Remedy. 

This mini episodic series uses humour to make everyday dramas feel relatable. It was designed to speak to the stressed out Gen Z audience, when traditional wellness advertising feels outdated and unrelatable. 

It started out as a stop-motion series, with characters built around the Rescue Remedy bottles. Their heads pop off in times of stress, and they feed themselves drops of Rescue Remedy to calm down. It was originally going to just be a couple of videos to help Rescue Remedy reach a new audience, but upon seeing the first in this series, they decided to scale it up considerably! By the end we’ve shot over 20 episodes in the Rescuerama series! 

However, with that scaling up came a change of approach. They wanted it to feel less polished, more ‘home-brew’. So after a lot of experimenting with the style of it, we opted for a very quick turn-around approach. It was no longer stop-motion, and was instead shot on phone with one hand, whilst my other moved the characters around with rods and string! This made it feel very silly, but also meant it was very fast to shoot and edit. They wanted this approach so that they could make reactive content in the event of a much-talked about finale or news-story. 

Some props were made by hand out of card and foam board… others are painted doll-house toys. One particular challenge was the voices. I wanted to achieve something similar to the 'animal crossing villager' style of babble. By essentially replacing most consonants with ‘B’s or ‘D’s in the script, and cranking up the speed and pitch of the voice lines, it created this silly effect that verges on understandable. 

The series generated over 60 million views, 7000% more than their previous Meta campaigns. It won Gold in social media at the Drum awards. 

Words by Nathan Joyce

Credits: 

Client: Small World Marketing, Rescue Remedy 

Videographer/stop-motion animator: Nathan Joyce 

Script writer: Serena Smart.

Character designer & Puppet Maker: Connor Chung

Puppet Maker: Areeya Bass

Prop Maker: Nathan Joyce

Sound design: Nathan Joyce

Commissioned by Mother