How did overnight packages get delivered back when dinosaurs roamed the planet? Not so successfully as we see in “Stick,” a spot for FedEx that premiered during Super Bowl XL and placed third in USA Today‘s 18th annual Super Bowl ad meter.
Created by BBDO New York and directed by traktor, the directing team represented by bicoastal/international Partizan, with visual effects courtesy of New York’s Framestore CFC, “Stick” opens on a caveman tying a stick that he needs delivered around the leg of a Pteranodon. The massive bird takes off only to be snatched out of the sky by a T-Rex. The stick falls to the ground, and the caveman goes to his boss to report that his attempt to get the stick delivered failed. Unfortunately for the caveman, his boss fires him. To make a bad day even worse, a Brac crushes the caveman when he steps out of the cave.
A wonderfully entertaining spot, “Stick” combines amazing, film-quality visual effects with a tight, funny script.
“Did you use FedEx?” the boss asks the caveman when he reports the failed delivery.
“No,” the caveman responds.
“Then you’re fired.”
“But FedEx doesn’t exist yet!” the caveman laments.
“Not my problem,” his boss replies.
What inspired BBDO associate creative director/copywriter Jim Le Maitre and his partner, associate creative director/art director Jonathan Mackler, to come up with such a bizarre idea? “If you sit around long enough, you come up with weird stuff like this,” Le Maitre remarked.
The goal of the spot, according to Le Maitre, is simply to demonstrate the alternatives–and the failings of those alternatives–to FedEx’s services.
TALENT EXCAVATION
After an extensive director search, BBDO chose to partner with traktor on this high-profile project. “They’re just really good at telling stories and adding a little twist, something you didn’t expect,” Mackler said. (In this case, it was traktor that suggested having the caveman kick a little dinosaur in frustration as he exited the cave.)
Of course, hiring the right visual effects shop was also a crucial decision, and BBDO went with Framestore, which was charged with the task of–among other things–creating the dinosaurs seen in the spot.
“Traktor was very keen to make sure the dinosaurs were as realistic as possible,” said Framestore’s David Hulin, who served as VFX supervisor/head of CGI on the project.
Framestore certainly has expertise in the area of dinosaurs. A few years ago, the visual effects shop worked on the BBC’s Walking with Dinosaurs, which has been hailed as providing the most accurate depiction of prehistoric creatures ever seen on screen.
All of the dinosaurs seen in “Stick”–in addition to the Pteranodon, T-Rex and Brac, we see an Orny (that’s the little guy who gets kicked by the caveman)–are based on real creatures.
Building the dinosaurs for “Stick” was a complex, time-intensive process. First, dinosaur skeletons were built in Maya, then the painting of skin maps was done in Photoshop. Those skin maps were later applied to the skeletons in Maya. Using a plug-in Framestore wrote for Maya, the artists added musculature to the dinosaurs and even went as far as to add a slightly rubbery membrane to the wings of the Pteranodon.
While Framestore labored to produce the dinosaur characters, the makeup artists at Stan Winston Studios in Van Nuys, Calif. created a properly prehistoric look for the live-action cavemen played by actors Jim Jackman and Andrew Hawtrey.
CAVEDWELLERS
“Stick” was shot entirely on location (with Tim Maurice-Jones serving as DP) just outside of Lone Pine, Calif., four hours north of Los Angeles. “We did a lot of scouting on this to try to find a place that looked as realistic as possible but not necessarily a place you had seen in every other prehistoric commercial,” said BBDO executive producer Elise Greiche.
This particular desert area provided beautiful scenery, including the gorgeous background vista with the snowcapped mountains we see in the spot, as well as a cave to shoot in.
Hulin and his Framestore colleague Murray Butler, VFX supervisor/senior Flame artist, went along to share their expertise with traktor.
Based on traktor’s storyboards, Framestore had created a pre-visualization, which proved helpful on the shoot. “Once [traktor] would set up a shot, we would do a camera alignment so that the directors could see roughly the composition of the shot with our CG creature in it,” Hulin explained.
A body double of sorts for the Pteranodon was employed for use in the scene where the caveman ties the stick onto the dinosaur’s leg. “This gave our cavemen something to concentrate on and something to react to,” Hulin said.
Later, the body double’s leg, covered by green tights, was removed from the scene and replaced by the Pteranodon leg.
Editor Gavin Cutler of Mackenzie Cutler in New York cut “Stick.” The sound design was completed by sound designer Marc Healy, also of Mackenzie Cutler, and sound designer Kim Christensen of Noises Digital in Berkeley, Calif.
Reflecting on the project, Greiche said that while it was a lot of work, the process was remarkably fun. “It was my first experience with traktor. They’re crazy, and they’re wonderful,” she said, noting, “They have really good ideas yet they are really collaborative. There was an instant trust with them.”
