The Mill, Grey New York and director Bryan Buckley of Hungry Man collaborated to create the “Marionettes” campaign promoting DirecTV’s new wire-free boxes, taking a jab at cable TV competitors. The latest spot at press time, “Dad Fight,” earned the number one slot on SHOOT’s quarterly VFX/Animation Chart. Like its predecessor commercials, including the debut ad “Lemonade,” “Dad Fight” features 100 percent CG dolls on strings.
Chris Bayol, shoot supervisor and 3D lead artist, explained: “The most important decision was choosing to shoot real actors in full wardrobe in place of the marionettes. This gave us a live set in which Bryan could direct and the actors could engage with real characters in their performances.”
Bayol noted that he and his compatriots at The Mill “studied the animation language of how marionettes move in great depth, even shooting puppeteers at Legacy Effects who are incredibly skilled and just amazing to watch. There were times where we heightened the clumsiness to add to the comedy value and other moments where we toned down the exaggeration to convey the emotional connection between the characters.”
Robert Sethi, creative director for The Mill, commented: “We knew that it was going to be an incredibly complex animation job from the start. There are multiple characters with intricate details, so we wanted to make it as smooth a process as possible for both Grey and Bryan. By basing it on live-action performance, we had an idea of what the shots would look like which was reassuring for everyone.”
Phil Crowe, shoot supervisor and creative director at The Mill, concluded: “Having worked with Bryan for years we’ve developed a trusting relationship which allows us to be involved in a project from the earliest stages. So we had access to everything from script to casting to wardrobe to get a step ahead of the game.”
Crowe observed that “live performance direction meant we could establish comic pace, ground the animations in reality and recognize the visual direction we were heading in from the start. It’s a brilliant example of a great collaboration.”
Fisticuffs
In “Dad Fight,” a regular guy and his marionette wife welcome her dad, also a stringed puppet, to their home. The house guest is informed he can watch whatever he likes on the TV in the bedroom in which he’s staying. But the father-in-law is a bit skeptical as there are no wires coming out of the television. His son-in-law explains that those nasty wires aren’t necessary since they have DirecTV. These are fighting words to the guest with strings attached. He pulls off his sweater, stomps his feet and asks his son-in-law if he wants to “dance,” meaning mix it up with some fisticuffs. The father-in-law proceeds to throw some punches, which do little more than tickle the chuckling young man.
Bayol said that among the biggest challenges that “Dad Fight” posed to him as a VFX artist were, technically speaking, the “tricky moments like him [the father-in-law] taking off his cardigan and throwing his tie around as there were multiple layers of clothes which all had to simulate against and collide with each other. And the puppets don’t have fingers that can squeeze on the material when they’re removing them–they’re just rigid hands. It was a complicated simulation but with Maya’s nCloth it was really successful.
For Sethi, the greatest creative challenge “was the performance animation. We had lots of iterations and internal discussions on how to make sure the stomping feet conveyed the right emotion and the turn from the TV to the dad. The goal was to get a bit of anger and make sure he read like he was angry whilst keeping it light and comic. There were also incredibly limited facial expressions so we had to focus in on the body language. It was really fun and came down to what performance is really all about–like in the theatre when an actor has to project and their movement has to be that big bigger for it to be read, without the subtle controls of the face.
As for how the decision to base their work on live-action performance came to pass, Sethi related, “In the beginning, we saw the scripts and always thought we’d do full CG puppets as, from previous experience, doing life-sized puppets is hard. When you have a live-action performer, you want to get the best performance from them of course. And to do that you need their reactions to real life interaction. It gives the direct something to work with and also something for us as reference.”
Bayol said, “Bryan loved being able to direct the puppet. Without that, it’s odd just pretending something’s there. He thrives on performances, so it fit in perfectly.”
Sethi added, “Also, everyone knew what they were getting as a baseline which was reassuring for all sides. From it we had a first pass animation which was very inspired by performance.”
Regarding their working relationship with Buckley, Sethi assessed, “It was a really tight collaboration, starting with planning out the job and going through storyboards together. When we said we wanted to shoot real puppets as reference, Bryan was totally cool with that.”
Bayol remarked, “Bryan interpreted the script in a genius way–he thought about how you can downplay their clumsiness while still making the situations hilarious, so a lot of the character came from him.”
See the Summer VFX & Animation Chart here.
