If you thought Road Runner was fast, check out the speed of a can of Mountain Dew featured in a new :60 for the soft drink. The live-action spot, titled "Animated," finds a group of extreme athletes chasing after the super-fast can as it zips through the air like a bullet. But like Wile E. Coyote, who never gets his hands on Road Runner, the athletes also fail to catch their prey.
The clever, high-energy spot is the work of BBDO New York and director Samuel Bayer, who did the job through Mars Media, a division of bicoastal HSI, but recently signed with bicoastal RSA USA (SHOOT, 4/18, p. 1). Method Studios, Santa Monica, produced the 2-D and 3-D animation and other visual effects.
"Animated" opens on a shot of a Mountain Dew vending machine that expands and spits out a can of Mountain Dew. The can zooms through the air at a speed so fast that it’s a blur to the eye. But then the action freezes, and we see the still can and a caption, which reads, "Mountain Dew (catchus-difficultus)."
Then the action resumes, and the can speeds along above a Southwest canyon, when suddenly a mountain biker appears and reaches for it. Before the biker can grasp the can, the action freezes and he looks down, clearly realizing that he is in the midst of a jump over a deep canyon—and he’s not going to make it. The expression on his face says: "Uh-oh." Then his body and the bike give in to gravity. Initially, his head stays in place and his neck stretches like a rubber band as his body falls, but then his head follows. From an overhead view, we see that he is ultimately reduced to a poof of dust at the bottom of the canyon.
Meanwhile, the can has continued on its journey, now traveling across a snowy, mountainous landscape. The can is moving so fast it plows through a series of tall trees, leaving holes in them. An airborne snowboarder in the middle of performing a trick makes a grab for the beverage but smacks into a rock face empty-handed. Flattened, he peels off the surface.
The can has now reached the city and speeds down a steep hill pursued by a street luger. The can zips around a corner. The luger follows and grabs a pole on the sidewalk to prepare for a sharp turn. As he comes around the corner, his arm stretches several feet in length.
Eluding the luger, the can speeds onward toward a BMX bike rider who skids to a stop and actually catches the can in his hand. But the can can’t be stopped—it yanks the rider off his bike and drags him through an alley.
The can breaks free of the rider’s grip and finally lands in the hand of an average guy on the street. The scene freezes, and another caption reads, "Dudeus (thirstus-quenchus)." The non-athlete gives the can a squeeze, and a stream of Mountain Dew arcs upward and into his mouth.
We zoom inside the man’s mouth as he opens wide. The Mountain Dew logo appears against a black screen, and accompanying text reads, "Life’s More Animated When You Do The Dew." As the camera pulls back, the screen turns green, and two Mountain Dew cans burst through the screen followed by guys on motocross bikes—it looks like the chase is on once again.
DEW or die
According to BBDO executive VP/executive creative director Bill Bruce, it seemed natural to place the kind of extreme athletes that have been featured in Mountain Dew spotwork over the past few years in a cartoon-inspired world. After all, much like cartoon characters, extreme athletes seem to defy the laws of physics.
Bruce, who served as copywriter/art director on "Animated," said he was inspired by a whole slew of classic cartoons, including Looney Tunes, The Jetsons, The Flintstones and Tom & Jerry, and aspired to create a live-action environment with "its own elastic reality where the confines of the real world don’t apply."
Before he pitched his idea to the client, Bruce conferred with Method Studios to see what was within the realm of possibility. "I didn’t want to promise something I couldn’t deliver," Bruce explained.
When Bruce was sure he could accomplish his goals, he sold Mountain Dew on the idea and hired Bayer to make it happen. Bruce and Bayer were both in agreement that the effects should be created in-camera as much as possible. "There was very little green screen," Bayer said. "Almost every stunt was done on location."
All of the guys featured in the spot—with the exception of the "dudeus" who drinks the Mountain Dew—are extreme athletes who performed their own stunts. "They’re not actors," Bayer said. "Even the guy that grabs the can off the bike—he wasn’t a stunt man, just a tough kid that let us beat the crap out of him."
The action was shot in five days in several locations with Method staffers, including visual effects supervisor Alex Frisch, on-hand to lend their expertise. (Frisch also served as lead artist/online editor/visual effects shoot supervisor on this spot.)
In Moab, Utah, Bayer, who also served as DP on the assignment, shot mountain biker Allan Cooke while suspending him from a rig near the edge of a cliff to make it look as though he was actually suspended several hundred feet in the air. Later, Method created the mountain biker’s stretching neck in 2-D. "We combined the head from one take with the falling from another take and recreated the neck to create the effect," Frisch explained.
In Mammoth, Calif., Bayer shot snowboarder Ben Hinkley doing a trick Hinkley dubbed "the lawn dart." "We actually shot him doing the jump," Bruce said. "We needed him to sail through the air. In all these classic cartoons, [there’s] someone sailing through the air, being very confident, and then out of nowhere they smack into a wall or a rock." To achieve the effect of the snowboarder being slammed into a rock, Hinkley was suspended on a rig, slid along a rail and "crashed" into a rock wall. According to Method 3-D artist/ visual effects shoot supervisor Laurent Ledru, the snowboarder was subsequently recreated in CG, and made to look flat. "It took a lot of modeling, texturing and rotoscoping," Ledru related.
Street luger Tom Mason was shot cruising down the streets of San Francisco. "He was going about sixty miles an hour," Bruce said. When Mason came to the corner, he didn’t really grab the pole, Frisch said. "The idea here was to get the practical motion of the luger for real, so basically the luger was grabbing a handle that was attached to a rope, and the rope was being released [from the pole] as he was turning. That way he was actually doing the turn for real, but obviously his arm was not attached to the pole [and stretching] because well, you know, he’s human." The visual effects team at Method replaced the length of the rope with a CG arm that appeared to be the luger’s extending arm.
Bayer also shot the Mountain Dew drinker, actor Rob Moore, on location in San Francisco. BMX rider Chad Kagy was shot on location in Los Angeles, and motocross riders Carey Hart and Colin Morrison were shot on the Universal Studios backlot in Los Angeles. Pop star Pink dropped by the Universal Studios location for about an hour during the shoot. "She was just hanging out with her man," Bruce reported. (For those of you who aren’t familiar with Pink’s love life, she is dating Hart.)
making it real
Once the shoot was done, the team at Method labored on the project for two weeks. "I think the challenge of this job was to do a spot that was an homage to the Looney Tunes cartoons, but with a look that was photoreal," Frisch shared.
Particular attention was paid to the can. "The can is the main character of the spot, so the challenge was to give it character and justify this chase," said Frisch, noting that the can was created in 3-D. "I think the value of doing it in 3-D was that it gave us absolute freedom to [control] the position and speed, even change the shape of the can."
Bruce was unable to travel to Santa Monica to observe the process in person, but Method was able to keep him up to date. "We actually used software that we have called MethodStation," visual effects producer/visual effects shoot supervisor Sue Troyan said. Developed by Method engineer Andreas Wacker, the software was downloaded into a laptop computer, allowing Bruce to view the clips sent by Frisch. "It was as if [Bruce] was in the room with us," Troyan said.
Editor John Murray of Nomad Editing Co., Santa Monica, who traveled to New York to work with Bruce, also had access to MethodStation in his edit suite.
As for Murray’s contribution to the project, Bruce, who has worked with the editor extensively over the last 10 years, credited him with keeping the spot flowing. Bruce noted that there was a point when he was set on getting a shot of a skateboarder slamming into a pole (which reformed to fit his body) into the spot. "I just tried to beat it [into the final edit]," Bruce said. As cool as the stunt was, Murray—who was not as emotionally attached to the footage—proved to Bruce that the final cut worked better without the skateboarder.
While the shoot and postproduction work was taking place, composer John Adair of Admusic, Santa Monica, did an extensive music exploration to determine what would work best. The idea of combining classic orchestral cartoon music with hip-hop or big beat was initially considered. "But ultimately, we all decided that the pure, unadulterated cartoon genre was what would serve the spot best," Adair said.
Adair wrote a complex post score, and an orchestra of musicians with experience in the cartoon realm was hired to bring it to life. "There are specific techniques involved in creating cartoon music that are unique to that genre," Adair explained, noting that the action in "Animated" is punctuated by big, funny slides on the cellos and violins, odd articulations made by brass instruments, and wild percussive sounds.
Adair also pointed out that if you listen to the music accompanying classic cartoons, you’ll periodically hear "quotes," or snippets of music borrowed from famous classical compositions. "It was done for comedic effect, expropriating highbrow art to make [the cartoon] funnier," said Adair, who chose to quote German composer Richard Wagner’s "Flight of the Valkyries" during the scene in which the snowboarder is soaring through the air.
"The key to cartoon music is to be very gesture specific, and to bring out the humor in each gesture and each scene," Adair said. His score is complemented by the sound design of Francois Blaignan of Nomad.
The music and sound design work hand in hand with the visuals to create a unique homage to classic cartoons that can be enjoyed by TV viewers of all ages, Bruce said.
Bayer credits Bruce with formulating an amazing concept. "I’ve done a number of jobs [for] BBDO and Mountain Dew," Bayer said. "Bill Bruce has gotten better and better. This was one of the best boards I’d seen in a long time."
