Chocolate Coronation Street - How Did They Do That

Behind The Scenes on how a Chocolate Coronation Street Is Created

It was Aardman Animation, the Oscar winning creators of TV's Wallace and Gromit, who magically brought the 'chocolate' Coronation Street and its characters to life. Seen at the beginning, middle and end of each episode, a total of nine different sequences were produced originally featuring a host of characters including a milkman, postman, the famous Coronation Street cat and even one of Jack Duckworth's pigeons.

The first step for Aardman Animation, was to go along to the 'real' Coronation Street at Manchester's Granada Studios. Hundreds of measurements were taken and copious notes made on the finer details of 'the Street' in preparation for the construction of the chocolate-look copy back at the Bristol studio.

The street mock-up took an eight-strong team five weeks to build, using a variety of materials including plaster, silicone and rubber. The finished set covered 352 square feet, and included a staggering 50,000 bricks, 1,000 paving slabs, 9,000 cobbles and over 12,000 rooftop slates. Ten litres of emulsion and a further ten litres of epoxy went into the creation. All the houses were reproduced in great detail, including the famous stone-cladding purchased by Jack and Vera Duckworth.

Meanwhile, another crew of 12 people were busy creating the characters to go in the set. They spent five weeks sculpting and moulding the 13 animated chocolate figures which brought 'the Street' to life. Twenty kilos of specially mixed and blended plasticine were used to match the silicon and resins to give the illusion of wonderful creamy Cadbury Dairy Milk Figures.

To bring extra lifelike qualities to the characters, model specialists engineered tiny ball-and-socket skeletons to enable the animators to achieve realistic movement in the chocolate land of Cadbury's Coronation Street.

With the completion of the set and models, the filming began and, after four weeks of painstaking work, it was in the can. Sequence producer Jo Allen said it was a big challenge to create the Cadbury's chocolate look because there were so many different elements to consider.

"The street itself and the models were made separately using a variety of different materials, but we had to carefully co-ordinate everything to make sure it all looked the same. The use of lighting and achieving the rich chocolate texture was very important - it was a great technical exercise. But it was a lovely project to work on. To see Coronation Street come alive as Cadbury's chocolate was wonderful."

Article Used by kind permission of Cadbury