This trailer for the new season of The Great British Bake Off was made in-camera using real baking ingredients.

The effect is remarkably fun; there is spontaneity and irregularity that stems from the use of real materials that would have been otherwise impossible to replicate using a standard cg technique.

The piece was created by Parabella, the London studio founded by Mikey Please and Daniel Ojari. They worked with a team of bakers, who used 500 eggs, 110 pounds of flour, and 62 pounds of sugar to make the characters for this ‘bake-mation’ short.

“Pretty much everything you see on camera is edible,” Mikey Please told the website It’s Nice That. “[S]tuff crumbled, sunk in the oven, went too soggy, went too hard. Turns out bake-mation is similar to stop motion animation in that it’s riddled with little hiccups that become central to the final piece. It was all about experimenting with material and seeing what they naturally wanted to do. Thumb prints in marzipan, crumbs on the worktop, burnt edges of pasties, it all stayed in the film.”

Please has posted some behind-the-scenes videos on Instagram that show the process of baking and animating the pastries:

Test reel for #gbbo #baking

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Filming some tests for #gbbo 'provers'

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CREDITS
Agency: 4Creative
Executive creative directors: Chris Bovill, John Allison
Creative director: Dan Watts
Creatives: Jack Croft, Stacey Bird
Production company: Blinkink
Director: Parabella
Director of photography: Simon Paul
Production designer: Gordon Allen, Parabella
Animators: Andy Biddle, Anthony Farquhar-Smith
Editor: Max Windows (Stitch)
VFX: Joseph Bicknell (Cheat)
Audio: Jack Sedgwick (Wave)
VFX supervisor: Simone Ghilardotti

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