The design team behind a smirk-inducing task on last week's episode of The Apprentice have opened up on what it was like to help candidates design a toothbrush.
Fans were left laughing last week during Episode Two of Season 16 of The Apprentice on Thursday, January 13, as hopeful candidates designed toothbrushes, one of which resembled fecal matter, according to viewers.
But Brittany Carter is not Bristol's only offering to this year's season. Innovate Design, which has an office at Paintworks, travelled down to the Salisbury studio to assist with the app part of the task.
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Whilst developing prototypes usually takes around six months, the Innovate Design team were able to complete the task in less than a day.
In the app team, Kinkit and Daniel, two designers from the company, worked on brush character design and animation. They paired these with motion capture suits, enabling candidates to dance and move about, which the characters then mimicked perfectly.
Meanwhile, the brush character had to then be combined into an app, which is where Innovate Designers Adam and Olivia came in. Olivia said: "Apps normally take months to develop but to save time with this we made a variety of app templates in advance.”
And although the design process looked seamless on national television, the team has explained that there were plenty of challenges involved during the big day.
Ben said: "The biggest challenge was definitely having to design a turd on national TV knowing full well what it looked like as I was drawing it.
"Also being asked to do packaging design last minute was stressful as we weren’t able to practice it as much – we didn’t find out we were doing it until I think a week before filming.”
Filming on the day started late, so designers Charlie and Ben were given just 30 minutes to sketch the brushes designed by contestants, which Isaac and Sulli then turned into 3D models and sent to be 3D printed.
At Innovative Design's Salisbury studio, design work commenced on the app at 3:30pm and, once they had been created, the Innovate team helped candidates build their characters. Dan had less than 20 minutes to design the tooth character for the girl's team, but was still happy with the result
At 3am in the morning, Olivia gave the app a final test before the team hopped in a taxi for London, where they then connected the apps to the toothbrushes.
When they arrived at the candidates' house, the prototypes were quickly finished in the garage before the production team filmed candidates receiving the brushes, and they were then split into teams to take the brushes to present to industry experts and a group of children for feedback.
Talking about her experience on the show, Olivia said: "I didn’t realise how much time it takes to shoot things! There were so many times when we had to do re-takes – I had to do a redo a section introducing myself and welcoming the candidates 4 times and it didn’t even make the final cut of the episode.
"I think the boys had a much better understanding of the game mechanism for their app, the game actually ensured that the child would properly clean all of their teeth and with a bit of development it could have been really fun to play,
"The girls’ team really hit the mark with their colours and styling which was much more engaging for the target age group but their concept made very little sense and only really ensured the child would brush for a certain length of time.”
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