In support of the new Sony PlayStation 2 role-playing game "Dark Cloud 2," TBWA/Chiat/Day, Los Angeles, and director Stu Maschwitz of The Orphanage, Los Angeles and San Francisco, have cleverly illustrated the thesis "every action has a consequence" with a hyper-speed trip back through time. Reversing an old cliché, the :30 "Consequences" shows that the more things stay the same, the more they change.
Combining an intriguing idea with breathtaking attention to detail, the spot—which remains visually engaging even after multiple viewings—explains how a seed-spitting frontiersman spawns a home that is eventually destroyed by a fallen tree branch. "Consequences" does for a rather shabby ranch house what London agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty’s lauded Xbox spot "Champagne" did for the typical English male: It traces a birth-to-death existence using a quick-moving time-lapse montage. The twist that "Consequences" offers is the concept that the entire montage runs in reverse.
We open on a shot of a shabby suburban home with a gigantic cherry tree standing in the front yard. One of the tree’s huge limbs has just fallen through the roof of the house. It looks like a nasty storm has just passed through the neighborhood.
A rumbling builds up, and the clouds overhead start reversing and moving in an opposite direction. The picture grows dark, and suddenly a magnificent lightning bolt flashes into the sky. The tree limb flies off the roof and reattaches itself to the trunk of the tree. Clearly, time has started moving backwards.
Quickly, the clouds dissipate and it’s sunny again—time has sped up to a full-blown reverse. If you look closely, the early-1990s model vehicle in the home’s driveway has been replaced by a ’70s-era full-sized van. The tree has gradually begun to shrink; the house has morphed into a slightly better state of repair.
The changes occur quickly and subtly. By the halfway point of the spot, a ’50s automobile is gracing the driveway, and a fresh coat of paint has been applied to the house. Then the whole suburb around the house begins to deconstruct itself until the house is standing alone in a scenic California valley. By now, an old truck is parked outside the house, and as the rewind continues, the house gets deconstructed until it disappears altogether.
Now all that’s left is the tree, which is shrinking, shrinking, shrinking down to sapling size. We follow the tree down into the ground. It disappears, and in its place, a seed pops out of the ground. The seed jumps up and follows a reverse arc back into the mouth of a spitting frontiersman. Then the man walks backwards out of the frame, until all we see is the uninhabited valley. A graphic proclaims, "Every Action Has A Consequence."
We cut to the obligatory 10 seconds of video game footage, as a voiceover intones, "Every decision, creation and invention affects the future … ‘Dark Cloud 2.’ " The spot ends on a graphic for the game and Sony PlayStation.
Which Came First?
When asked how their reverse-time concept evolved, art director Chuck Monn and copywriter Doug James both indicated that they knew the consequence (the shattered house) had to be shown before the action that caused it (the tree’s seed). "If you do the spot in forward motion, it makes the seed-spitting scene insignificant—separated from the message," Monn said. "We always knew you needed to see [the house] at the very beginning because … working backwards from the house to [the spitting of the seed] allows the initial action to be the last thing you see."
The idea corresponded well to the actual video game, which, according to a review on Gamers.com "allows you to build a town in real time by plopping down trees, roads, houses and other objects, and then [lets you travel] forward through time to see how your handiwork affects the future."
With their concept established, Monn and James turned to the problem of production. "There were a million ways we thought about executing this, but one thing we wanted to have was realism," revealed James. "We wanted it to feel as accurate to real life as we could get it, because so many elements of the spot were screwing with reality already, such as the fact that it proceeds backwards through about a century-and-a-half in about twenty seconds. So we looked at doing animation, at using hard-core stop-motion stuff. We even tried to see if we could do it in-camera with some different techniques and some editing."
Maschwitz and The Orphanage proposed an approach to the spot that drew on several mediums, including live-action, 2-D and 3-D animation, stop-motion photography and the heavy use of compositing technology. "We hadn’t worked with The Orphanage before, but we were so impressed after we met them the first time that we were confident they’d nail the spot," Monn said.
Monn and James provided Maschwitz and company with the initial broad storyline, and then proceeded to let them fill in the details. The first step in producing the spot, according to Maschwitz, was a two-day live-action shoot.
"The first day, we shot the frontiersman in the valley," said Maschwitz. "Probably the most interesting thing that day was that we had to do a lot of reverse playback on the set because the takes we thought looked the best as they happened weren’t necessarily the ones that worked best in reverse."
Maschwitz said he also did a stop-motion shoot that day to capture the seed coming out of the ground. "We shot the seed landing in front of the camera, and then poked it into the ground and took frames of that, so when you play it backwards, it looks like the seed is sort of emerging from the ground," he related. "That was our ultimate low-tech effect."
The next shooting day, Maschwitz filmed the house, which The Orphanage team constructed in miniature. "[It was] about forty inches across and designed to be ‘breakaway,’ so it could be crushed by our miniature tree branch—which was actually a real tree branch about three-and-a-half feet long," related Maschwitz.
"The branch was attached to a mechanism so that it wouldn’t just fall on the house, but would slam down with the force of a hatchet," he added. "We had the camera shooting at a hundred and fifty frames per second so that when you play it back in telecine, it’s just this beautiful, detailed, slow-motion image of individual shingles flying off and flipping over and so on."
Once the destruction was filmed, Maschwitz and his team commenced a three-week animation and compositing process that yielded an incredibly detailed time-lapse sequence, which depicts the house’s devolution from the day of the storm, to the day it was built in the ’30s. Then the montage follows the tree as it shrinks back to the frontiersman’s fateful expectoration.
"Every frame became a unique compositing task," Maschwitz said. "We had a little animated frame ticker up at the top of our [workstation screens], and instead of being a time code, it was actually a years indicator—it started in 2003 and rolled all the way back to the turn of the century.
"Basically every frame in the spot is a season," he continued. "We skipped over winter because we thought it would be too distracting—almost like a strobe light—if we had every fourth frame go white with snow. We also skipped night for the same reason. With time-lapse photography, you notice things like the tree—which changes smoothly over time—and you notice things that flicker and change rapidly, like the cars in the driveway. So our challenge was to find the appropriate amount of smoothness that would move the spot along, but also honor everything that’s flickering and wiggling around."
The Orphanage team was able to endow every frame with the sort of detail not immediately noticeable in real time, yet immensely valuable to the spot. Some examples: a tire swing rocking on the tree, pet toys scattered on the lawn, a dog urinating on a fire hydrant, a man drinking Jack Daniel’s on the front porch of the house. The team even came up with a computer-generated model to ensure that the various cars in the spot wouldn’t be parked in exactly the same position from frame to frame.
Monn and James indicated that while The Orphanage possessed a dizzying arsenal of special effects options, the staffers there didn’t feel the need to show off during the spot’s postproduction process. "The story led the effects work and not the other way around," James said. "Even though [Maschwitz] has a large amount of post expertise, he approached this job like a director from the very beginning. He really kept everyone on the same page for telling the story."
