McDonald's McWings Food Commercial

McDonald’s launched McWings with a campaign film and a set of social cut-downs, run through Craft.

Most of what reaches the screen was not in the room. The wings behave in ways real chicken does not, animated by hand in post, so the shoot day existed to give the post team material to build onto rather than to produce finished frames.

That inverts the usual order of a food shoot. Normally the decisions get made on the day, in front of the food, with everyone watching the same monitor. Here every decision about where each wing sits, what it does and when it does it had to be settled before anything rolled, because the plates shot on the day only work if they match animation that does not exist yet. Get an angle wrong and it is not something the edit absorbs. It is a return to the studio.

So the day produced three things, none of which is visible in the finished film. The empty stage, shot on the rotating mirrored platform as clean plates from every angle the animation would need, so the wings could land in real light with real reflections underneath them. The template passes, framed and timed to the moves the wings were going to make. And every wing photographed the whole way around, so post had the true surface of the product, the crust edges and the way light sits on the glaze, instead of an approximation of it.

The reason to build it this way rather than model the food outright is that McDonald’s product has to read as itself. Customers know what the wings look like, and they notice when a burger or a wing has been drawn instead of cooked. Animation gives the campaign movement the food cannot perform on its own, while the food in every frame is the real product, photographed. Working out all of that in advance, in the right order, and leaving the studio with a complete set of plates, is most of the job.