A tragic love story of operatic proportions is presented in a :30 Haägen-Dazs spot titled “Opera.” The protagonists: a honey bee and a flower.
As the commercial opens, a bee is buzzing around near a garden shed when he hears the call of a flower in need of pollination. He goes to her and gets oh-so-close… But a strong wind blows, and despite a valiant effort to connect, the bee is blown away.
“Honey bees are dying, and we rely on them for many of our natural ingredients,” a female voiceover intones. She then implores us to “help us save them.”
Viewers are directed to Helpthehoneybees.com where they can learn more about the plight of the honey bee. The site also provides an introduction to the newly-created Haägen-Dazs Vanilla Honey Bee flavor, which blends vanilla with a taste of honey.
It was actually the creatives at Haägen-Dazs’ San Francisco-based agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners that came up with the idea of inventing the new flavor. In researching how food is produced, Goodby group creative directors Margaret Johnson and Jim Elliot and the rest of the creative team discovered that honey bees, the insects responsible for pollinating one-third of the food that we eat, are disappearing at an alarming rate.
The creatives pitched a Help Save The Honey Bees-themed campaign to Haägen-Dazs, which relies on natural ingredients like strawberries and blueberries for its ice cream, and the client immediately embraced and was sold on the idea.
Haägen-Dazs didn’t have a huge budget but decided to create at least one television commercial to fit into a campaign that includes viral video, print ads and the aforementioned website.
Working out of bicoastal collective Psyop’s newly-created Los Angeles office, Cedric Nicolas-Troyan and Laurent Ledru co-directed the spot.
A delicate balance Johnson said that the agency relied on Psyop to generate “an animation idea that could really bring some magic into this love story.”
There was a balance to be struck, added Elliot, noting that the animation couldn’t be so fantastical as to take away from the poignancy of the story. In the end, “We think these guys did a great job of combining animation with live action to create something that was really magical but also really powerful,” Elliot said.
And then there is the music: The stirring operatic track that accompanies “Opera” is key to telling the tragic love story.
Composer Drazen Bosnjak of the New York office of Q Department took on the task of re-arranging a duet from “Cavelleria Rusticana” and making it work within the context of a mere :30 format. He then recorded the piece with tenor Kip Wilborn and soprano Julianna DiGiacomo.
Nicolas-Troyan and Ledru said they found the music to be a great inspiration as they worked to bring the story of the bee and the flower to life in dramatic, operatic fashion.
Back to nature In creating the live-action garden that served as a base on which the spot’s CG flower and bee were placed upon, the directors put together a highly-stylized set made up of white flowers, a garden shed and a painted blue sky backdrop on a stage at Panavision in Woodland Hills, Calif.
“All of the pieces of the background were put together in a very specific way so that the bee and the flower could pop out,” Nicolas-Troyan pointed out. “Everything on the set was white, and there was a little green, but it was a gray green.”
The live action was shot in HD by cinematographer Heimo Ritzinger with the Panavision Genesis camera, providing Psyop’s team of artisans with “very sharp and clean images that blend well with CG,” Nicolas-Troyan pointed out.
To choreograph the movement of the CG bee through the garden, a real bee (albeit a dead one) was attached to a stick and shot moving through the garden for reference.
Creating a CG bee was perhaps the greatest challenge involved in the making of “Opera.” Ledru strove to produce a bee that looked real, but he didn’t want to create a 100 percent accurate reflection of what an actual bee would look like.
That, explained Nicolas-Troyan, was specifically because, “A real bee would be really spooky and kind of gross that close up.”
For the spot to succeed, viewers needed to find the bee attractive and buy him as a romantic lead.
With that in mind, Ledru altered the proportion of the bee’s body and the shape of its eyes, and he chose not to put fur on its legs (real bees have furry legs) in order to create a more appealing protagonist.
(The CG bee and other artistic and techincal considerations helped to earn the Psyop ensemble on “Opera” a slot–entry number four to be exact–on SHOOT‘s quarterly Visual Effects & Animation Top Ten Chart, which appears in this week’s issue.)
Goodby, Silverstein & Partners and the client were most favorably impressed with the look of the final spot–the bee in particular.
“It’s interesting because we looked at so much visual reference of bees going into the project, and if you’re not careful, they can be unappetizing, which is a huge danger when you’re doing a spot for ice cream,” pointed out Johnson.
This was key to the spot’s success, continued Johnson who observed, “I think Psyop did a wonderful job romanticizing the bee and making you fall in love with him.”
