When it comes to diaper ads, we don’t expect much visual creativity. But “Soirée” for Huggies via JWT New York is something to marvel at. Directed by Fredrik Bond of MJZ and featuring the VFX work of N.Y.’s MassMarket, the :30 centers on a baby who wreaks havoc at an upscale loft party.
The spot was designed to promote Huggies Little Movers diapers, which are shaped to fit in a way that allows babies to move faster and more freely. That insight led the creative team at JWT to wonder, could Huggies have created a diaper that has babies moving so fast they can’t be caught? From that question came the idea of producing a spot that finds a baby in overdrive. But rather than have the baby whizzing around like Road Runner, which would seem like an obvious route to take, the creative team, including copywriter Daniel Gonzalez and art director David Suarez, created a sense of speed through a series of frozen vignettes. While the baby is a whirlwind of destruction, whipping around the party and knocking over everything from a plate of spaghetti to an aquarium with his dad in hot pursuit, the action is depicted in a series of intricate still moments.
At the outset of the project, senior integrated producer Owen Katz was confident his creative colleagues at JWT had conceptualized a brilliant spot, but he confessed he wasn’t sure Bond would even look at the brief given that it was for a diaper commercial.
Bond did look at it and was impressed by the possibilities and challenges. The director not only executed what he read on paper, but he “took it the next mile. He added value. He pushed the boundaries. He pushed the budget,” Katz said with a laugh. “He made the spot better, and you don’t always get that when you hire a director. I hate to say it on the record, but it’s true.”
Low-tech
Given the complexity of what JWT and Bond wanted to pull off, MassMarket executive producer Justin Lane felt it was important to get everyone involved in the project in one room together to plot out a course of action. Going low-tech, Lego toys were spread out on a conference table, serving as representations of the people in the spot, and a camera phone was flown through the setup to show how the camera would move within the environment. MassMarket used the resulting video to create an animated pre-vis.
Just over a week later, Bond and DP Hoyte van Hoytema shot “Soirée” on location at a Manhattan loft. “We shot all of it for real,” Bond said.
Each vignette was arranged and lit, and shot individually, a motion control camera snaking through the scene. For the most part, the actors, which included Rod Luzzi as the dad and Bond’s friend Emil Moller, whom he described as an amazing pantomime, had to make an expression and hold it. Some were standing, while others hung from the air on wires. (A mannequin stood in for the baby.) But Bond didn’t require total stillness. “If you look closely, they are all moving slightly,” Bond shared, explaining that the movement–you’ll see one girl’s eyes darting toward the end of “Soirée”–gave the spot life.
As far as postproduction, MassMarket touched every frame of the spot, rotoscoping the individual vignettes and marrying them together; adding 3D elements, including the cake and cake bits we see hanging in the air and the water in the fish tank; completely removing the ceiling of the loft and replacing it with a 3D ceiling; and speeding up or slowing down certain segments. Massive amounts of rig and wire removal were also performed.
For marrying the vignettes together, “Something that worked to our advantage was the spot was shot on RED,” said sr. Flame artist Jamie Scott. “Shooting digitally meant the motion control shots lined up a lot better than if it had been shot on film.”
The biggest challenge of all for MassMarket was the 3D head replacement on the baby, according to MassMarket lead Flame artist David Parker. Katz credited MassMarket with developing a camera rig that–as unobtrusively as possible–swung around a real baby and captured numerous facial expressions from varying angles. MassMarket’s 3D department then used those stills to create CGI baby heads.
On track
The guys at MassMarket weren’t only interested in talking about their work on “Soirée,” by the way. They also praised the music. Licensed for “Soirée,” “Let’s Dance Together” is a Paul Reeves contemporary track with a Roaring ’20s vibe. “A lot of times, we find the best spots come out of a serendipitous moment where everything just comes together–the music, the visuals and the storyline,” Lane said.
“The music is not like the music you hear in most diaper ads, and the visuals are not what you’re used to seeing in most diaper ads,” Gonzalez mused. “That takes a bit of bravery on the part of the client.”
