In the new :30 "Pac-Man," Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco, replaces the traditional yellow video game character with a red Saturn VUE. In the style of the old-school Namco game, director Rupert Sanders of Omaha Pictures, Santa Monica, illustrates how you can pick up all kinds of things and pack them into the Saturn SUV as easily as Pac-Man gobbles up white dots.
The spot opens with a shot of the red VUE in a driveway at the end of a cul-de-sac. Like a game piece, the Saturn spins around in a circle, and traditional Pac-Man sound effects begin. Then a man gets behind the wheel and starts driving the car down the street, which is filled with large white balls suspended above the middle of the road. As the vehicle approaches the white balls, they disappear—"eaten up" by the car.
From an aerial view, the town looks like a Pac-Man game board, with white dots all along the VUE’s path. At various points, the car stumbles upon some "bonuses": groceries bags filled with fruit, a young girl outside of an amusement park with a large stuffed animal, a girl beside a soccer field, and a kayak and bike in front of a sporting goods store. Once the car encounters these objects, which are spinning above the road, they disappear from the streets and reappear within the car—except for the bike and kayak, which reappear on the SUV’s rooftop rack. Each time the automobile picks up an item, traditional Pac-Man sound effects denote that the driver has earned additional points.
After gathering all the people and objects, the SUV pulls back into the driveway and a voiceover concludes, "The infinitely versatile Saturn VUE—it helps you pack everything in." Then the Saturn logo appears, followed by the end tag, "People first."
VIEW FROM ABOVE
The objective of the spot was to show the VUE’s versatility and ability to hold a lot of things. "The concept allowed us to show a guy driving around town, doing routine things like getting groceries and picking up kids from soccer games in a really cool way," senior art director Stephen Goldblatt related.
Shots that primarily show the SUV from above and from the side reinforce the video game feel of the commercial. Goldblatt attributed this approach to Sanders, saying that the helmer brought a clear set of rules to the production to give it a side-scrolling, game-like look. The team shot on location in Los Angeles for two days, and then spent one day in a helicopter gathering aerial footage.
Sanders also wanted to create the effects in camera. The white balls actually sat atop stands anchored to the road, and the spinning children were on turntables cloaked in green fabric. "It was really important to me to have the real [world] meet the computer world, rather than just adding computer effects that would look like computer effects," the director said. "It was important that it was picking up real things that were floating, and that the balls felt real as well."
In addition, Sanders said it was important that the children hover above the road instead of standing on it as they waited for their ride. "[I was] trying to make it a little more abstract, but within the parameters of the real world," he explained.
During postproduction, visual effects shop Ring of Fire Advanced Media, West Hollywood, removed the rigs, stands and turntables. According to creative director/set supervisor Jerry Spivack, his team used simple techniques to finish the spot. "It was basic layering of background plates to balance them all out with shadows and highlights … and compositing, which is basically removing the rigs from underneath the balls, and then some tracking, because a lot of the side shots had tracking on them."
Editor Neil Smith of The Whitehouse, Santa Monica, which also has offices in Chicago, New York and London, cut the piece. Composer Jason Johnson and sound designer Michael Anastasi worked on the spot through stimmüng, Santa Monica. The agency got Namco’s permission to use the game’s sounds.
"When we first came up with the idea [for "Pac-Man"], we thought it would be really cool to have this quiet spot with just sound effects and no music," Goldblatt shared. "But then after hearing and seeing it for the first time, we realized that it was pretty annoying so we needed music, and stimmüng really helped out there. … They created a track that added a nice pace to the spot, and it really helped with some nuances [and] the narrative of the commercial."
