Super Bowl XLII delivered surprise victories for the New York Giants and perennial loser Charlie Brown. As we saw in the Coca-Cola spot titled “It’s Mine,” which ran during the fourth quarter of the game, two Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons–Underdog and Family Guy’s Stewie–gave chase after a Coca-Cola contour bottle balloon only to have Charlie Brown unexpectedly rise up and take possession of the sought-after bottle.
Standing–or maybe we should say floating–head and shoulders above the rest of the Super Bowl spots, the :60 “It’s Mine” was created by Wieden + Kennedy (W+K), Portland, Ore., and directed by Nicolai Fuglsig of bicoastal/international MJZ, with visual effects–believe it or not, all of the balloons featured in the spot are CG and one scene is entirely CG–produced by the artisans of The Mill in New York.
Additional credit goes to Robert Miller of stimmung, Santa Monica, who arranged the version of Gioachino Rossini’s robust overture to The Barber of Seville that accompanies the spot, and editor Russell Icke of The Whitehouse, New York.
For Fuglsig, who was not available for an interview at press time, the job represented “something whimsical and very different for him,” MJZ executive producer Eric Stern said. “It really gave him a chance to play in a different tonal place.”
Looking back on the ambitious project, it is a miracle that the spot came together at all, said W+K creative director Hal Curtis, who revealed that “It’s Mine” was originally intended for last year’s Super Bowl game. But the agency simply couldn’t get the spot together in time, so the idea was temporarily shelved. W+K got the go ahead from Coca-Cola to produce the commercial for this year’s Super Bowl.
High five
“This is one of the toughest projects I’ve ever been involved in,” Curtis reflected, noting, “We had five clients–the Macy’s people, the Stewie people, the Underdog people, the Charlie Brown people and the Coca-Cola Company. Then we had to pull off a live-action shoot in New York [many of the background plates were shot by Fuglsig and DP Ellen Kuras during the most recent Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade], which was difficult in and of itself, and we were still only half-way done because then we had to do the animation.”
Both Curtis and fellow W+K creative director Sheena Brady credited W+K producer Matt Hunnicutt with taking the ball and running with it, working closely with them, Fuglsig and The Mill to coordinate the production.
It began with a pre-visualization produced by The Mill that gave everyone a sense of how the spot would look and flow. Elsewhere, real balloons were constructed specifically for the spot and actually shot before it was decided to scrap them and go entirely with CG balloons. “It just ended up being easier to create all of them than matching real balloons to CG,” Brady explained.
“I can’t say enough about The Mill, and the terrific job [creative director Angus Kneale] and the whole group there did,” Curtis added. “We were very nervous about the balloons and whether they’d look real because if they didn’t, the spot wouldn’t take you to this place where you would believe this is happening. But we were thrilled with what they did. It was amazing.”
Get real
Realism was the goal in creating the balloons, which were supposed to truly look as though they had floated away from the Macy’s Parade. “We had to keep pulling ourselves back from going cartoony,” Kneale shared. “It was very tempting to subtly tweak expressions from shot to shot, but we found it was better to keep them looking as real as possible and use camera angles to tell the emotional story.”
Beyond building photorealistic balloons, another challenge was determining their speed. “If you moved the balloons too fast, they felt small and fake and CG,” Kneale said. “If you moved them too slowly, they became lumbering and disinteresting.”
Accurately portraying how the balloons would physically react to banging into buildings was also tricky, The Mill’s senior CG artist Ben Smith pointed out.
There are numerous small but crucial details that were painstakingly tended to. For instance, Smith had to solve the task of how many tethers each balloon should have. The real Underdog balloon used in the parade has over 40 tethers. But using that many tethers in the CG version of Underdog would have been visually confusing, so the CG Underdog only has about 18 tethers–enough to look realistic without being distracting. The thickness of the tethers had to be altered on a shot-by-shot basis to make sure they could be seen, depending on whether the camera was closer on the action or further away.
Though intensive, the spot was well worth the effort, Kneale said. “We were excited because it was an original idea that I don’t think is derivative of anything we’ve seen before.”
