"I’ve always loved animation," says Jon Parkinson, senior creative director on the Ford account at J. Walter Thompson, Detroit. "But it’s not used that much with cars. I suppose it’s because people want to see sheet metal." Recently, Parkinson and his team scrapped the sheet metal and enlisted the animators at Wild Brain, San Francisco, to create "Speedball," "Dolls" and "Hula" for three new Ford Focus models. Blending 3-D and cel animation, the clever spots are a far cry from traditional automotive ads.
"Speedball" starts, not with a shot of the car, but with a pop cultural symbol, the Happy Face. As the face suddenly blasts forward at 60 mph, its tongue hangs out of its mouth and its eyes bug out blissfully. The camera then pulls back to reveal that the Happy Face is a speedball, perched atop the antenna of a Ford Focus ZX3. In "Dolls," Russian nesting dolls come apart, pile into a Focus ZX5 and drive off. And in the op art-inspired "Hula," the circular highway navigated by a Focus ZTS Sedan turns out to be a Hula Hoop, balanced on the hip of a giant woman.
Unusual as they are, the ads still spotlight the cars, which are rendered via three-dimensional CG animation. "We get a very good look at each vehicle," notes Parkinson. "The client was delighted with that."
When agency art director Bill Majewski and copywriter Merritt Fritchie first suggested using animation for the campaign, Parkinson was immediately receptive. Majewski and Fritchie worked on "Speedball" and "Dolls," while John Jackson and Scott Whaley were, respectively, copywriter and art director on "Hula." "We tend to target younger for Focus," he explains. "We think it appeals to young people or people who are young at heart. So animation seemed like the right thing to do."
And Wild Brain seemed like the right animation firm to do it. Parkinson says he and JWT senior producer Tom Robertson selected the eight-year-old company because, "They did a ton of [preparation] for us, and they seemed to be in tune with our way of thinking."
The JWT team didn’t regret its choice. "[Wild Brain] really did a great job," Parkinson relates. "From the start we appreciated, not just the body of work they’d done, but their ability to communicate."
Interestingly, none of that communication was done in person. "I’ve been [in advertising] for twenty years," says Robertson, "and this was the first production I ever had where, for the entire twenty-five weeks, I worked from behind my desk. Every day, I would come in and check Wild Brain’s Web site, and check e-mail, where the material would be posted at various stages. Revised character drawings, background movements, refinements to the car—it was mostly done by posting on the Internet.
"The timeframe we had was very accelerated," he adds, noting that he also received 3/4-inch reels of the work in progress. "Without the technology of Wild Brain’s Web site and e-mail, we never could never have pulled these spots off."
TEAM EFFORT
Despite the tight schedule and the distinct lack of face-time, the process of creating the three spots was collaborative from the start. "At the beginning, they had these really simple, three-panel storyboards," recalls Wild Brain’s Denis Morella, who served as director on "Dolls." "A bunch of us [directors] came up with all sorts of different ideas, and chose the ads that appealed to us the most."
For Morella—a collector who once designed a series of wooden puzzles for Curious Toys, a division of Curious Pictures, New York—"Dolls" was a natural choice. "Nesting dolls usually have all this painting and detail," he explains. "They’re really beautiful, but very Old World-looking. I wanted to do something that was cooler and slicker—maybe with a simpler Japanese type of design."
While the JWT team liked that concept, "We went through a couple of iterations with the board," Morella recalls. "I did this thing where [the dolls] were coming apart almost like a Rubik’s Cube or Transformer robots. They jumped in the air and started opening in these weird ways, with all kinds of pieces coming off them. It was a really cool board, but they didn’t look like nesting dolls any more."
So Morella created modern-looking, monochromatic dolls that opened in more conventional ways. "Some of them pop off, some of them screw apart," he notes. "They animate differently, but they’re still nesting dolls."
Like "Hula" and "Speedball," the three-dimensional, CG-animated "Dolls" was created with Alias| Wavefront’s Maya software, and composited in Nothing Real’s Shake. "I’m really happy with the way the dolls look," says Morella, who also utilized Studio Paint software. "They look like shiny plastic, and yet they have texture and detail."
"Dolls," which was shot concurrently with "Speedball," took around two months from start to finish. "It was a fun job all the way through," Morella reports, "because we knew it was going to be cool and different."
"Speedball" director Nicholas Weigel took a special interest in his spot, too. (Wild Brain’s Mike Smith served as senior creative director on this commercial.) "I was immediately attracted to the ad when the boards came through," says Weigel, who got his start doing 3-D animation for Time Warner/Atari games. "I felt it would be perfect for 3-D. It could be stylized and fun and snappy and super fast."
Though the bulk of "Speedball" was done in 3-D, traditional cel animation was used as well, although most of that footage is only in the director’s cut of the spot. "The goal was to do convincing character animation in 3-D," Weigel explains. "The artistic part of it is to take the edge off a 3-D look by adding in 2-D elements."
Smith collaborated with Weigel on the storyboards and the general creative direction of the spot. Wild Brain’s J.T. O’Neal handled the 2-D animation on "Speedball." "Mike’s a really great traditional animator, with a sort of sharp-pointed, underground style," Weigel observes. "He came in early on the conceptual part of the job, and together we laid out what parts would be nice in traditional animation, and what would be nice in 3-D.
"We looked for elements like spittle and sweat and smoke," continues Wiegel. "Things we could add in the postproduction phase as traditional drawn elements, to give it more of a special look." (O’Neal integrated the 2-D and 3-D elements.)
Since "Speedball" was Weigel’s first commercial directing job at Wild Brain, he welcomed Smith’s expertise. "Mike’s been in the field a lot longer than I have, and I’ve always looked up to him," Weigel relates. "After we got through the creative, concepting phase—figuring out what we wanted to do and how we wanted to frame shots up, Mike was working on other jobs, so I took it from there."
Some of Weigel’s concepts, like "the face pulling off and seeing the skull underneath it," never made it to the screen. "Ultimately, we came to a compromise with the client, where it was nice enough to see this Happy Face icon really take a joy ride."
Even so, Weigel reports, "We have two versions of the spot: One that has a lot more 2-D animation effects on it, like a comet effect coming off the back of the ball, and slobber and spit and all sorts of fun stuff. The other one, which was more of a middle-ground sort of spot, was the one that aired."
"I like the design-y stuff the best," says "Hula" director Gordon Clark. It shows. The car and hoop elements in "Hula" were 3-D, while the dancing hula girl was rendered in 2-D animation, with supporting elements in 3-D; the piece has the stylized look of a magazine ad. "In the early bidding stages, before we got the job, I did a board for ‘Hula,’ " he recalls. "It was based on the idea from the agency, but it made more of the weirdo, optical illusion-type thing."
The JWT team, Clark reports, "liked the board, and that’s what sold more than any art direction we attempted. There was a little bit of back-and-forth as far as how big the car was supposed to be. But it was pretty much, from the beginning, based on the storyboard that we first sent them."
"Hula," which began shooting after the other two spots, also took about two months to create. The process, however, was markedly different, with 2-D serving as the template. Clark explains. "We started off by guiding everybody with 2-D layouts," explains Clark. "From there, we were able to separate the first part from the second part. The 2-D artist was able to go ahead while the 3-D person did his whole camera move layout, and at the end, we fit the 2-D back into the 3-D."
At times, the elements overlap. "You’ve got a 3-D Hula Hoop on a 2-D girl," Clark relates. "But it wasn’t that difficult. There is contact with the Hula Hoop, but it wasn’t like she was holding something in her hand and her fingers had to wrap around it. We were still able to go off in our own corners and work simultaneously."
JWT’s Parkinson says he’s pleased with the response to all three spots, adding that he’d "definitely consider" animation for future Focus ads.
