By SANDRA GARCIA
Last spring, while MTV’s on-air promotions department was cleaning up at awards ceremonies like The One Show, MTV Commercials, a fledgling division incarnated out of MTV’s animation department, was celebrating the completion of its first outside spot assignment for a U.S. client.
"Video Vixen," created for 7-Eleven via Dallas-based The Richards Group, was a breakthrough for MTV Commercials, New York (SHOOT, 6/18/99, p. 1). The division had only started marketing itself for spot work in late ’98 under the aegis of executive producer Nick Litwinko and president Abby Terkuhle, former director of MTV on-air promotions. Based on its 7-Eleven work, MTV Commercials won a few regional projects—one for a hair product called Elasta QP via Young & Laramore, Indianapolis, Ind., and a spot entitled "Ready to Rumble" for Midway Games through Pyro, Dallas.
While it was not limiting itself to animation projects, the commercials division had managed to pull in clients based on work done through MTV’s animation department, including the series Daria, Celebrity Deathmatch and Beavis & Butt-Head.
A few months ago, MTV Commercials got the high-profile job it had been seeking. TBWA/Chiat/Day, Los Angeles, was looking for a company to animate its latest Sony PlayStation campaign promoting the video game "Spyro the Dragon 2," which stars an evil purple dragon of the same name. According to TBWA/Chiat/Day copywriter Michael Collado, Will Vinton Studios, Portland, Ore., and Olive Jar Studios, Boston and Burbank, were in the running for the assignment with MTV. "When we first decided to [market for commercials], it was like, the golden calf was TBWA/ Chiat/Day," recalled MTV Commercials head of marketing and sales Henry Hagerty, who is also an independent rep through his own New York-based company, The Think Bank. "We had done some other work, but in terms of national exposure, this was the big one."
Because of the twisted nature of the Celebrity Deathmatch and Beavis & Butt-Head series, the advertising world initially shied away from the presumed wacky animation guys at MTV; the feeling was that the division’s off-centered sensibilities might encounter some difficulty making it through the client/agency bureaucracy. But with the Sony PlayStation project, MTV proved it could be left-of-center and accessible at the same time.
The three-spot campaign features a temperamental, fire-breathing CG dragon that moves from a futuristic cyberworld into a live-action environment, and tortures clay animation characters that resemble the animation of Jules Bass and Arthur Rankin in Frosty the Snowman and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
In "Doggy Advice," a boy and his dog stand in front of a small, suburban pink house, when in flies the seemingly innocuous Spyro. Delighted, the boy repeatedly pulls the purple dragon’s tail, ignoring the dog’s warnings to stop. Spyro becomes increasingly agitated and finally takes the kid and chucks him at the "camera," where his face is flattened against the lens and he slides off the screen. In "Hiding Snowmen," two snowmen hurl snowballs at an off-screen Spyro. As they hide behind a log cabin, Spyro sneaks up on the pair and melts one into a puddle with his fiery breath. The other one runs for its life, but Spyro winds up scorching him in the end. The third in the series, "Home Video," is a spoof on the feature The Blair Witch Project. In it, a snowman in the woods at night turns its home video camera on himself and talks about how scared he is of Spyro.
Contained in the client’s brief to the agency was the stipulation that the spots had to include the CG Spyro character. "We thought that if we put the CG dragon in a live-action environment, it’s going to look like Tony the Tiger kind of stuff," explained Collado, who conceptualized the spots along with TBWA/Chiat/Day art director Doug Mukai. The team instead chose to combine the CG character with old-school, stop-motion animation.
The TBWA/Chiat/Day creative team spent seven weeks in New York working with MTV animation director John Payson and Litwinko on the stop-motion portion of the spots. The duo had created many of the original animated station IDs for MTV when the network was first starting out. Each stop-motion element was shot with a high-definition camera, and all the spots were finished in hi-def. (They were ultimately down-converted to digi-beta for television.) Meanwhile, Nick Digital, MTV Networks’ in-house digital department, worked alongside Payson to craft the CG Spyro character in Maya. The two animation elements were then composited together in Inferno at Black Logic, New York, by visual effects artist Patrick Ferguson.
"Because they’re new, they were really ambitious to do the best job possible," Collado said of the commercials division. Added Mukai: "They were really good because they weren’t coming from a TV commercial kind of place. The first thing they showed us was Celebrity Deathmatch, and we knew this wasn’t going to look like a conventional TV commercial."
Hagerty regards the TBWA/ Chiat/Day job as pivotal for MTV Commercials. "We have sort of broken through whatever wall that had been put up, particularly with this campaign. Now that we have done some high profile, really intricate [animation] stuff, people are starting to realize that it is extremely professionally run. The things that Abby [Terkuhle] and Nick [Litwinko] have pulled off on the programming side have translated over to commercials," said Hagerty. The commercials division is currently gearing up to do a new project using cel animation, but was not at liberty to disclose any details.
On the programming side, MTV Animation continues to put its creative efforts behind Daria and Celebrity Deathmatch, and is in production on a third series called Spy Groove, which is set to premiere in the second quarter of 2000. Terkuhle added that the department hopes to launch two to three series next year. "I think both the commercial division and the programming division will be incredibly busy," said Terkuhle.
Additional credits for the Spyro campaign go to TBWA/ Chiat/Day creative director Jerry Gentile, producer Phillip Lopez and assistant producer Blythe Barger. Nick Digital CGI animation director was Jason Strougo. Other Nick Digital CGI artists included Joel Sevilla and Cody Chen. MTV stop-motion animators were Greg Pair and Tunde Adebimpe. MTV Commercials manager of commercials was Corey Galloway. The spots were cut at JumpCut, New York, by freelance editor David Claire. The Black Logic producer was Dan Conners. Original music was composed by George Brandle of bicoastal George Brandle Music. "Hiding Snowmen" was mixed by Doug DeFranco at New York-based McHale Barone and by Locky Fotopolous of Clack Sound Studios, New York. Fotopolous recorded voiceovers for all three spots and was also the mixer for "Doggy Advice" and "Home Video." Additional voiceover for the spots was done at BBP Recording Studios, Los Angeles, by Brian Boyd.
Tim Burton Discusses His Dread Of AI As An Exhibition of His Work Opens In London
The imagination of Tim Burton has produced ghosts and ghouls, Martians, monsters and misfits — all on display at an exhibition that is opening in London just in time for Halloween.
But you know what really scares him? Artificial intelligence.
Burton said Wednesday that seeing a website that had used AI to blend his drawings with Disney characters "really disturbed me."
"It wasn't an intellectual thought — it was just an internal, visceral feeling," Burton told reporters during a preview of "The World of Tim Burton" exhibition at London's Design Museum. "I looked at those things and I thought, 'Some of these are pretty good.' … (But) it gave me a weird sort of scary feeling inside."
Burton said he thinks AI is unstoppable, because "once you can do it, people will do it." But he scoffed when asked if he'd use the technology in this work.
"To take over the world?" he laughed.
The exhibition reveals Burton to be an analogue artist, who started off as a child in the 1960s experimenting with paints and colored pencils in his suburban Californian home.
"I wasn't, early on, a very verbal person," Burton said. "Drawing was a way of expressing myself."
Decades later, after films including "Edward Scissorhands," "Batman," "The Nightmare Before Christmas" and "Beetlejuice," his ideas still begin with drawing. The exhibition includes 600 items from movie studio collections and Burton's personal archive, and traces those ideas as they advance from sketches through collaboration with set, production and costume designers on the way to the big screen.
London is the exhibition's final stop on a decade-long tour of 14 cities in 11 countries. It has been reconfigured and expanded with 90 new objects for its run in... Read More