If you grew up watching those wonderfully cheesy monster movies Japanese filmmakers churned out in the 1960s, you may remember Guilala.
Then again, you may not.
Guilala, who caused destruction in the 1967 feature The X from Outer Space, never quite became a star.
But Guilala has enjoyed a revival 40 years later in Japan, starring in the 2008 feature Guilala’s Counterattack: The Touyako Summit One-Shot Crisis, and now he’s being seen in America in a new :45 for job search service TheLadders titled “Little Creatures.”
Created by Fallon Minneapolis and directed by Dante Ariola of Los Angeles-based MJZ, “Little Creatures” opens with Guilala lumbering toward an oncoming truck. Of course, any monster movie aficionado knows what’ll happen next–Guilala will pick up the truck and toss the vehicle like it was a toy.
But that’s not what happens. Instead, the truck passes above Guilala, revealing that this version of the monster isn’t even a foot tall and therefore hardly a threat to anyone. In fact, as the spot goes on, we see mini Guilalas trying to wreak havoc–attacking a car at one point–but doing no damage and gaining little notice from humans because of their small stature and weak roars.
“If you think about it, this is what makes TheLadders different from other job search sites,” a voiceover intones as a scary gargantuan Guilala arrives on the scene, blowing up a gas station with a fireball spewed from his mouth and picking up a car and throwing it down the street as people run for their lives.
“Welcome to TheLadders: a premium job site for only 100K plus jobs and only 100K plus talent,” the voiceover concludes.
Big strategy According to Fallon executive creative director Al Kelly, the goal with “Little Creatures” was to use abstract imagery to make the point that TheLadders is for big talent.
Fallon director of broadcast production Vic Palumbo said that everyone involved in the making of the spot–the agency, Ariola and Venice, Calif.-based effects house Method Studios–wanted to stay true to the monster movie genre of the 1960s “and to stay true to the genre, we had to try to do as much of it as we could in-camera.”
“Little Creatures” was shot onstage and on location in Cape Town, South Africa, with production support provided by Cape Town’s MIA. The city offered Ariola and his crew, including DP Philipe Le Sourd, wide latitude in what they could shoot, allowing them to stage the gas station explosion for real and perform a stunt involving a car racing down a street and flipping.
With the stunts and background plates shot, Ariola headed into the studio where he got old school, shooting a guy in a Guilala suit performing various actions in front of a bluescreen.
The Guilala suit was actually the original suit worn in the Guilala films, by the way, and it stood six feet tall and weighed about 100 pounds. The guy inside the suit wore a vest outfitted with hoses through which cool water was pumped to keep his body temperature down. Even with that accommodation, the man could only wear the suit for about 10 minutes or so before he needed a break.
The fact that he could perform at all in the suit and give the character a sense of personality is rather remarkable given the limitations it imposed, Palumbo said, pointing out, “He had to be very expressive with his body to translate those emotions–the frustration, the disappointment.”
While Ariola worked to get the best performance he could out of his talent, Method Studios VFX supervisor/Flame artist Alex Frisch and VFX supervisor/lead CG artist Andy Boyd were focused on “recreating the camera setups onstage, matching the camera setups of the background plates that we shot earlier in Cape Town,” Frisch said, ensuring that the eyelines and camera angles would be correct.
Once the shoot wrapped, Kirk Baxter of Rock Paper Scissors, Santa Monica, cut “Little Creatures,” and Method Studios combined the elements.
Practical match “For us, the challenge was creating the 3D Guilala so that he would match absolutely perfectly with the real practical suit that was shot,” Frisch said, noting, “There are quite a few shots where it cuts from a studio shot to a 3D guy and back to the studio shot.”
If he had to peg the toughest scenario to put together, Boyd said it was when the large Guilala blew up the gas station. “That was combining a 3D monster, the 2D studio shot monster, 3D cars and a real explosion,” Boyd said. “It was challenging to bring together all of those effects in one shot.”
The entire job was done at 2K resolution, with colorist Stefan Sonnenfeld of Company 3, Santa Monica, going back and forth with Method Studios to achieve what Frisch describes as a “pristine color correct and composite.”
Credit also goes to Human, New York, which composed the menacing monster movie track that accompanies “Little Creatures,” with sound design from Santa Monica-based house 740 Sound.
