A group of students has created a budget version of John Lewis’s Christmas TV ad campaign in just seven hours with a £700 budget.
The students from Brixton’s School of Communication Arts took on the challenge to ape John Lewis’s Man on the Moon commercial, which reportedly cost £7m and took seven months to create, in a budget fashion as a promotion for discount offer company MyVoucherCodes.
The shoestring production, called Christmas Doesn’t Cost the Moon, was started at about 8am on Friday after the students watched the John Lewis TV ad for the first time, and was completed by 3pm.
The “commercial” features props and products sourced from pound shops and local builders including toilet roll tubes for a telescope and what looks like an Action Man or Ken doll as the man on the moon.
“While John Lewis are never knowingly undersold, our speciality is knowingly underselling,” said Chris Reilly, general manager of MyVoucherCodes. “Despite fears at the start of the day we might be looking at a turkey, we strongly believe we’ve produced a cracker.”
