When R&R Partners, Las Vegas, started to think about how it might advertise for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, the firm decided to convey the message of freedom. After all, Las Vegas is a place to escape the rigors of daily life, and who better to benefit from such escapism than the thoroughly oppressed? "We were looking for things that were really stuck in their ways," explained R&R Partners art director/copywriter Arnie DiGeorge. Taking the word "stuck" quite literally, DiGeorge and his partner, art director/copywriter Becca Morton, built a story around perhaps one of the most incarcerated objects of them all: the mudflap girl.
While many of us have seen silhouetted girls on mudflaps, have we ever stopped to consider the plight of these perfectly poised babes? Beautiful, curvaceous and sentenced to a life of eating dirt en route to some far-flung destination: What fun is that? In the :30 "Mudflap Girls," two of these bad-ass females take matters into their own hands.
The spot opens with a long shot of a truck stop off a two-lane highway. A big rig pulls in and its driver steps out, heading for the convenience store. We hear the rumblings of women whispering, "Hurry up, we have to get out of here," but where the voices come from is unclear. Cut to a shot of a chrome mudflap girl, who climbs down off her rubber perch on a New Jersey 18-wheeler, then runs over to help her twin mudflap mate.
Once free, the two triumphantly slap hands, working their way towards another truck to an arrangement of "These Boots Were Made for Walking." A sense of mischief is in the air as they pass another mudflap with a cartoon bulldog on it. Bypassing the barking dog, they continue on, turning cartwheels and giggling at their rebellion. Finally the driver returns to his rig as the girls quickly affix themselves to the mudflaps of a different truck. As that vehicle pulls out, we see the girls are bound for Vegas: On the back of the rig a sign reads, "Vegas or Bust." The supered message appears: "Freedom To Go Your Own Way."
Perhaps the easiest way to animate the characters for this spot would have been to use CG animation, but the agency was looking for something more realistic. "We wanted to keep the actual feel of a mudflap girl, without turning it into some kind of Terminator-type computer-generated effects deal," explained DiGeorge.
To that end, the agency hired bicoastal Olive Jar Studios—now known as Red Sky, which has offices in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Atlanta, Houston and Chicago. Olive Jar was purchased by Red Sky in September 2000, while in mid-production on "Mudflap Girls" (SHOOT, 10/6/00, p. 1).
Over the course of several telephone conversations between Red Sky director Flip Johnson and bicoastal HSI Productions’ director Zack Snyder—Snyder helmed the live action portion of the spot—it was decided that the mudflap girls would be created out of aluminum cutouts. The idea was to have one cutout made for every position the girls might possibly be in during the course of the spot. Rigorous storyboarding was done to predetermine the girls’ placement frame by frame. "Trying to pre-visualize where the pieces were going to fit was the biggest challenge for me," Snyder related. "I needed to make sure I was correctly supplying [Red Sky] with what they needed."
A team from Red Sky was on the set of the live-action shoot to oversee the technical angles relative to the animated characters. "HSI was really great in that they dedicated an effects unit just to deal with the plates that we needed to deal with, and then had another unit dealing with the talent and the other aspects of the shoot," recalled Red Sky executive producer Matthew Charde.
Meanwhile, Red Sky 2-D animator Jaime Maxfield worked to create two-dimensional drawn silhouettes of the girls. According to Johnson, several of Red Sky’s producers were asked to do cartwheels and other stunts in the office in order for Maxfield to replicate human movements. The drawings were routinely sent in QuickTime files over the Internet for the agency’s approval.
After the 2-D drawings were finished, they were brought into Maya and Flame and then translated into CAD (computer-aided design) files that could be read by a laser cutting machine. Minneapolis-based aircraft metal parts manufacturer Air Safety Inc. was deployed to cut what turned out to be over 1,000 mudflap girls in different poses. Each one was 18 inches high and one-eighth of an inch thick.
Batches of the cutout girls were sent back to Red Sky’s motion-control studio in Boston, where they were buffed and treated with pigment to give them a weathered look. Each character was given a registration tab to keep track of where the girls needed to be placed in relation to each other. Now Red Sky was ready to bring the elements into its 3-D motion control, stop-motion stage.
During the live-action shoot, Red Sky took 35mm slides of the set, so that Johnson could later figure out what might be reflected by the mudflaps’ aluminum surfaces. With the slides, Johnson built photo panels to be placed on stage around the cutouts to essentially recreate a life-like reflective environment. As the aluminum girls moved, elements like the sky and ground could be seen reflected in the metal bodies. "We used a little blue screen, but for the most part, everything else around them was reflecting like the real world," explained Johnson.
Red Sky also had shipped in real truck wheels and mud flaps for its shoot. "We took the mudflaps and reanimated them with all the action and reaction as the [animated] girls got on and off them, and the fake wind was all shot on our stage," Johnson reported. "Afterwards, the [animated] girls and the mudflaps were composited into the live action."
Overall, the project took 13 weeks. Nearly 1,000 mudflap girls are still hanging around the Red Sky and R&R Partners offices. At press time the agency was considering sending them out as promotional material.
