A giant piece of toast lumbers through the city, a dragon/snake creature happily dips in and out of the street as if he is swimming in a lake, and a three-eyed monster nervously darts through traffic. These colorful characters and others–all of whom look like they were drawn in crayon by a five-year-old–come to life in AT&T’s :60 “Birthday.
Meanwhile in sharp contrast to the inspiring artful creations springing from a youthful imagination comes a harrowing man-made creation which has jeopardized our seas and the life they sustain. In The Surfrider Foundation PSA “Rise Above Plastics,” a gray whale swims through an ocean polluted by plastics. The mammal desperately seeks an open patch of water in order to surface but to no avail. The whale becomes helplessly coated in a seemingly never ending floating bed of discarded, dirty plastic bottles, bags and six-pack rings. He leaps out from the debris but lands only to be literally beached while in the sea. The camera pulls back to reveal the mind-numbing extent of the pollution which appears as an enormous floating island of plastic. A super informs us that plastics kill some 1.5 million marine animals each year.
These distinctly different spots–in tone and feel–top this quarter’s SHOOT Visual Effects and Animation Chart. The Mill, New York, was the visual effects house on the chart-topping “Birthday” while right behind it was “Rise Above Plastics,” which came out of Portland, Ore.-based animation studio LAIKA/house.
“Birthday” Directed by Peter Thwaites of Gorgeous Enterprises, London, and bicoastal Anonymous Content for BBDO New York, AT&T’s “Birthday” combines live action, animation and effects unfolding to the charming song “Pure Imagination” sung by Gene Wilder from the 1971 film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. We see the drawings inhabit the city only to start to fall down towards the end of the spot as if the life has gone out of them. A man in a suit sitting on a bench looks deflated. “Remember when you were five, and anything was possible,” asks a voiceover.
The man takes a look at his phone and he lights up upon apparently reading some good news. “Happy fifth birthday, again,” the voiceover says. Both the man and the characters spring back to life, framing an optimistic, inspiring message about the possibilities of technology, encapsulated in AT&T’s new tagline, “Rethink Possible.”
Director Thwaites recalled receiving the original concept for “Birthday,” noting it was accompanied by a single picture of a cut-out figure that looked like a stick man. “That one image got me. As soon as I saw that image, I thought, ‘This is going to be great,'” Thwaites enthused.
It was important that the drawings truly felt like the work of a child, so Thwaites employed the production designer’s son Sam, who is five years old, as an artist. “I didn’t want to force him to do anything he would not normally do, so I said, ‘Okay, draw me what you think Toastman would look like.’ I’d just give him some words, things to play with, and then he’d come up with the characters,” Thwaites shared. “The important thing was the characters had to feel like they were being created by a child’s imagination, not an adult’s version of a child’s imagination.”
The artisans at The Mill, New York, then took those drawings–Angus Kneale, The Mill’s VFX supervisor and creative director also took advantage of his four-year-old son’s artistic skills–and turned static characters into moving, breathing beings.
“It was important to capture a unique personality in each of the characters,” Kneale said. “Our cel animators went through character explorations to develop a style for each hero. We decided to frame animate the characters by hand, purposefully kept it very naive and rough–this allowed a lot of character to come through just from the line style and texture.”
“In tandem, our 3D VFX and animation team were developing dynamics simulations relative to the weight and size of the characters,” Kneale continued. “Even though they started out as small hand-drawn characters, they also had to feel like they were fifty feet tall and really there. This was an interesting balance to find so that both parameters worked.”
While the character development and animation was an intensive, planned-out process, Thwaites took a looser approach when shooting in Los Angeles the live-action city footage–with cinematographer Wally Pfister lensing from lower angles to replicate a child’s point of view–that these drawings would inhabit. “We were making it up as we went along,” Thwaites said. “It was quite a unique way of shooting for the crew because half the time they didn’t know what was going on, and frankly, neither did I. But that’s how we found lots of odd stuff that we never really would have planned for if we had tried to plan it out precisely.”
Ultimately, the images and music combine to create a world of childhood wonderment.
“Rise Above Plastics” Aaron Sorenson of LAIKA/house, Portland, Ore., served as director/animator on the Surfrider Foundation PSA, which earned the number two slot on SHOOT’s quarterly chart.
The creative inspiration for the storyline came to Jeremy S. Boland, creative director at Portland-based ad agency Borders Perrin Norrander (BPN), during a rainy day in Oregon. Boland saw trash flowing down a street sewer grate near a local playground.
“I saw the plastic, man-made waste filtering through a street drain and thought about how most people never think about its final resting place, our oceans,” related Boland. “The Freudian thing about trash for most people is that if it’s out of sight, it’s out of mind. The juxtaposition of our future leaders playing in the school’s playground and a plethora of plastic waste spurred me to think about how I could raise awareness of its negative effects on marine life. I knew the spot should have a stylistic appeal and a humanism that is easily communicated through animation.”
Boland gravitated to LAIKA/house, having earlier collaborated with the studio on a animated campaign for the Oregon Lottery. “Once again I brought my ideas to Aaron [Sorenson] and he and I just started jammin’,” said Boland.
First briefly seen swimming unencumbered, the whale was hand drawn and animated, while the plastic debris was CG.
“We used natural elements created in the hand-drawn 2D animation style and matched them with unnatural objects made in CG,” said Sorenson. “The result is an illustrative style that visually defines and separates the pollution from the living characters like the whale and the ocean.”
LAIKA/house has these varied disciplines, including CG, 2D and stop motion, in-house.
The CG elements were animated in Maya and rendered in Mental Ray. Nuke was used for a lot of the compositing and projecting matte paintings over geometry, with final compositing done in Flame. Some of the particle effects were done in After Effects, ink and paint for the cel animation was done in Toon Boom’s Opus and some of the more painterly cel animation was done frame by frame in Photoshop.
The effects animation was challenging from the sheer number of bottles in some of the shots. Getting the 2D whale in the beginning to integrate with the CG trash as it sticks to his body posed an interesting problem. LAIKA/house used a proxy CG whale in some shots as a collision object to give the trash something to stick to and then adjusted the tracking by hand to work with the 2D whale. There were some elements like the plastic bags that just had to be animated frame by frame because they were attaching to the whale’s mouth or stuck on his fin.
Jan Johnson, LAIKA/house co-executive producer, added, “The beauty and message of this thirty-second call to action heartened the entire animation team. In fact, LAIKA/house no longer uses beverages sold in plastic bottles. I hope this spot also inspires others to change their habits and save our oceans.”
The Surfrider Foundation is a grassroots environmental organization dedicated to the protection and enjoyment of our world’s oceans, waves and beaches. Now in its 25th year, The Surfrider Foundation has grown from a small group of surfers in Malibu, Calif., to a global movement that’s more than 500,000 members strong with 90 chapters worldwide.
The Surfrider Foundation reports such sobering environmental facts as:
• Annually a million birds and 100,000 marine mammals die from ingesting or entanglement in plastics.
• In certain parts of oceans, plastic particles outnumber plankton by a ratio of 46 to one.
• And virtually every piece of plastic ever created still exists in some shape or form.
A special website, www.riseaboveplastics.org, chronicles the plight of the oceans due to the onslaught of plastics. Riseaboveplastics.org provides a running count of plastic bottles that have been thrown away in landfills since the site’s launch last year. The number is staggering and increases by the second.
The site also offers easy tips for people to follow in order to reduce their plastics footprint. They include no longer using bottled water, opting for reusable grocery bags, ceasing to use plastic sandwich bags, using silverware instead of plastic eating utensils, and buying in bulk so to avoid single serving packaging.
Scott Fox produced “Rise Above Plastics” for BPN. Annie Pomeranz produced for LAIKA/house. Among other key LAIKA artisans were technical director/CG lead Patrick Van Pelt, technical director Karl Richter, illustrator/After Effects artists Jenny Kincade, VFX supervisor Ben Fischler, and Flame artist/compositor Rex Carter.
