McDonald's 'My Rewards'
We are delighted to have been part of this lovely piece with director Simon Willows and McDonald’s, bringing to life their vision of a modern 8bit game.
Aug 19, 2021
5 min read
Director: Simon Willows
Prod. Company: Cndy
Agency: Scholz & Friends
Client: McDonald's
A project close to our hearts — partly because it gave us a legitimate excuse to go deep on voxel art.
Working with director Simon Willows and McDonald's, the brief was to bring a modern 8-bit game world to life, and we threw ourselves into it. Voxel art is a specialism, so we did what we always do: found the best people for the job as machines simply can't interpret things properly. Just look at the difference the nose makes on the overall character!
One expert in character design, one in world-building — working remotely from Romania and Brazil respectively, across time zones, piecing together an intricate world brick by brick.
The first creative decision was establishing scale, and we anchored everything to the products. A hamburger and a drink became our reference objects — rendered in voxel form that was fun and instantly recognisable, but deliberately unrefined.
The moment voxels get too polished, they stop feeling like voxels, and that lo-fi, 80s game quality was exactly what we were protecting. Every prop, every corridor, every element of the restaurant environment was calibrated against those two objects, with small tweaks where needed to keep the focus on the food.
The transition sequence required motion capture, which came with its own complications — we were doing everything remotely through COVID, supervising both the live action shoot and the mocap session from London while production was happening in Germany. Not ideal, but we made it work.
Running in parallel, we built the layout using rough blocks first — the same kit-of-parts logic used in game development.
It's an elegant approach: a contained library of elements that can be arranged and rearranged with real flexibility, keeping construction effort manageable without sacrificing creative range.
The hero characters — boy and girl, plus a cast of extras throughout the restaurant — were fully rigged with both facial and body animation. That raised an interesting question about voxels: how do you handle skin deformation in a system built from rigid cubes? Our answer was to allow deformation while deliberately limiting the range of motion, keeping things simpler than a pure CGI character rig. It felt right — faithful to the aesthetic, but alive enough to perform.
The final film is a proper love letter to the era: a McDonald's restaurant packed with tokens, collectables, and prizes, just like the real thing — only eight bits at a time.
I want to thank everyone involved in the project; it was quite a challenge in the time given and the conditions we lived under, Covid and needless to say, it was super fun to do.
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