An animated video that shows a fantasy encounter between two fighter plane warriors is being used by Microsoft to promote its digital music player Zune.
72andSunny/Los Angeles, which created a multi-media campaign to launch Zune last year, is playing “Dogfight” at www.zune-arts.net. Zune Arts is the second element of the Zune campaign that merges TV spots that show Zune being used in various social settings with short films, including “Dogfight”, and printable posters, which are shown at zune-arts.net. The site promotes the concept of friendship and sharing, which is the campaign’s central brand message — filmmakers and other creative professionals can share their work on the site and Zune users can share tracks with each other.
“Dogfight” also ran on Adult Swim on the Cartoon Network July 1, the first time a Zune Arts films has been broadcast on TV.
Although the film features fighter pilots who shoot torpedoes at each other, it actually promotes Zune’s friendship and sharing credo. “It’s a metaphoric story,” said Jason Norcross, the 72andSunny writer. “People in the spot are sharing together. They both fire off missiles, but they’re coming together to create something surprising.”
The surprise is the colorful montage shown at the end of the spot as the two fly off together, one of the pilots riding on the tail of the other’s plane. “It’s metaphorical, but that’s the point,” Norcross said. “The bigger picture it creates is a venue of artists who can come together and be collaborative.”
Fulltank/Santa Monica, the design/animation studio, combined traditional hand drawn cel animation with 3D elements. “The main characters and some smoke and explosion effects were completely drawn and cel animated. The planes and particle explosions were 3D, while most of the fantasy creatures were broken apart and animated in After Effects,” said Chris Do, Fulltank’s creative director. Lead Illustration, Ronald Kurniawan, illustrated and painted the characters.
Do said 72andSunny developed the idea of a period piece with a dog fight and Fulltank expanded the narrative into a written treatment.
One of the challenges was “mixing the media together, 3D with cel, and how we would match the camera perfectly so they were believable in the scene,” he said. The other challenge was to “bring these pre-drawn and pre-colored creature characters to life. They were just 2D cards. We had to break them apart, the hinges, arms, eyes and wings and custom animate them in a 3D space.”
He also said the edit process was extremely important to the pacing of the story, “hitting and bridging all the cuts with explosions to make it dynamic and figuring out what worked and what didn’t.”
The soundtrack of the film, “Special Thing,” from Viva Voce, a Portland, Ore.-based band, is a soft folky song that provides an ethereal tone to the video.
The end result was “more of a short film than something that felt like a commercial,” Do said. “One of our criteria was that it be a cool little short film and no one would think it was a Zune commercial until the end.”
