Building a Mystery: Inside the Waitrose Christmas Key Art 2024

Christmas campaigns don't come much bigger — or more fun — than Waitrose's 2024 effort, Sweet Suspicion: A Waitrose Mystery. A festive mystery built around a missing No.1 Red Velvet Bauble Dessert, the campaign paired Saatchi & Saatchi's script with a genuinely stacked cast: Matthew Macfadyen, Joe Wilkinson, Rakhee Thakrar, Sian Clifford, Dustin Demri-Burns, and Eryl Maynard, directed by Lucy Forbes across two cliffhanger episodes.

You can watch the full film here, and see our print work from the campaign on our site here.

Our job was the print campaign built to sit alongside it — eight individual character posters, plus one main key art bringing the entire cast together into a single image. It's the kind of brief that sounds simple on paper and is genuinely complex in practice, so we wanted to walk through what actually went into it.

Sweet Suspicion: A Waitrose Mystery

Nobody was ever in the same room

Here's the part people are usually surprised by: none of the cast were photographed together. Not for the character posters, and not for the main key art either.

Every character was shot individually, on their own schedule, against their own setup. The room they're all supposedly standing in — the Christmas tree, the floor, the curtains, every piece of set dressing — was shot separately again, element by element. The finished main key art, with the full cast apparently gathered in one scene, was built entirely in post: every character carefully composited into a single constructed room, lit and graded to look like one continuous, believable photograph.

The eight character posters followed the same logic on a smaller scale — each actor shot solo, then comped into their own scene, matched for light, shadow, and colour so nothing gives away that the "room" around them never physically existed with them in it.

Why it's done this way

Shooting a cast this stacked together, in one room, on one day, is close to impossible to schedule — and even if you could, a live-action group shot leaves far less room to adjust. Building it in post means every character's pose, expression, and lighting can be chosen from multiple takes and locked in independently, then assembled with full control over how the final composition reads. The trade-off is that the entire believability of the image comes down to the compositing and retouching — get the light direction, shadow falloff, or colour temperature even slightly wrong on one element, and the illusion breaks.

The payoff

What made this one satisfying is that none of that complexity is meant to show. The final key art should read as one warm, chaotic, cluttered Christmas scene with a house full of suspects — not as nine separate photoshoots stitched together. That's really the whole job: doing enough work that nobody clocks the work at all.

Congratulations to Saatchi & Saatchi and the whole Waitrose team on a brilliant campaign — we had a great time building it.