A representative from animal rights organization PETA visited BBDO New York a few years ago as part of an initiative to urge advertising agencies not to use great apes in commercials. Executive creative director Toygar Bazarkaya and his colleagues were stunned by what they learned during the presentation.
“It’s one thing to say no animal was harmed at a shoot. But we had no clue that the animals were being separated from their mothers right after birth and that the mothers go into depression,” Bazarkaya shared, adding, “When the chimpanzees are around 4 years old, they perform in front of the camera–the problem is when they are around 8, they become too strong and dangerous for sets, so they are discarded, left in roadside zoos for the rest of their lives, and they can live until about 60 [in captivity].”
BBDO New York signed an agreement with PETA, pledging not to use great apes in its work. The agency also asked what else it could do to help the cause, and soon enough, the idea for “98% Human” was born.
The :30 spot, featuring a voiceover by Adrien Brody outlining the horrible lives that these creatures are forced to live after being taken advantage of by the entertainment and ad industries, finds a chimp alone in a sterile room contemplating suicide, picking up a gun and placing it under his chin. Before he pulls the trigger, the screen goes black. We see the PETA logo, the email address GreatApePledge.org and the line, “No real apes were used in this commercial.”
It’s a stunning revelation because the chimp in the spot looks and feels real. Yet he is the creation of Mill+, the design and animation studio of New York’s The Mill. “The second I read the board, I thought, ‘Wow, this could be really powerful,’ ” says Mill+ animation director Angus Kneale, who also holds the title of creative director at The Mill.
One might assume that Mill+ went the motion capture route for “98% Human,” outfitting an actor in one of those specialized suits and tracking his movements, but Kneale wanted to try a different approach, and BBDO New York was willing to take the risk. Why not go with the tried-and-true method of motion capture? “The technology in those suits actually gets in the way of the storytelling. It gets in the way of capturing the emotions,” Bazarkaya maintained, adding, “We did not want to capture the motion. We wanted to capture the emotion.”
So Kneale shot actor Ryan Garbayo in regular clothes, focusing on his emotional performance rather than suiting him up simply to obtain data for animators. “We weren’t treating the shoot like we were going to be doing everything 3D,” Kneale said. “We treated it with the care and detail and level of respect that a normal production would have gotten.”
Garbayo’s performance was recorded during a one-day shoot which took place in a cold, stark operating room at an abandoned hospital in Passaic, New Jersey. Maryse Alberti, whose film credits include The Wrestler, served as DP.
“We used the actor as a template for composition, timing, lighting, emotional reference, and we cut together a spot purely based on his performance,” Kneale said. (Max Koepke of New York’s Lost Planet was the editor.) “We went through many, many different iterations, cutting a live-action pre-vis for our chimpanzee.”
Using clean background plates and Alberti’s camera moves, the animators then reconstructed each shot in the pre-vis and created an animated chimp whose emotional performance was inspired by that of the actor’s.
Layered effect The animal was built layer upon layer, starting with the skeleton. “We knew that we were going to use a lot of close-ups, and we knew that they were going to be very well lit, and there was going to be nowhere to hide in terms of detail. So we started realizing that the only way to get true movement was to go and build the whole underlying structure underneath the chimp’s fur,” Kneale explained.
Creating a skeleton, a muscle system, skin and then fur was a complex process. “We could have built a model and put fur on it and animated it, and it would have looked okay,” Kneale acknowledged. “But we would have hit a limit with realism, and we just didn’t want to hit that limit.”
The most challenging part of constructing the CGI chimp was getting his eyes right. “About a month before delivery, we were in this terrible place where it didn’t work. It didn’t look good. It didn’t feel right. It felt like an animatronic puppet. It just didn’t have any life in it,” Kneale recalled, noting that the eyes were to blame.
The visual effects team re-worked the chimp’s eyes until everyone was convinced that they were looking into the eyes of a living creature. “At the end, it was a lot of finessing,” Bazarkaya said. “The last five percent was probably the hardest and most time consuming.”
The attention to detail paid off. “People are blown away when they realize it’s completely digital,” Kneale said of “98% Human,” pointing out that even the gun seen in the spot is CGI.
