Animals live it up, lip-syncing Lionel Richie’s “All Night Long” in a new :30 for Mountain Dew MDX energy soda created by BBDO New York. The aim of these party animals in “Nocturnal” is to reach the night owls among those in their late teens and early twenties, the target audience for Mountain Dew MDX.
Singing animals in spots–that’s traditionally dangerous territory. And BBDO associate creative directors Peter Kain and Gianfranco Arena, copywriter and art director, respectively, were well aware of just how, well, cheesy this commercial could have turned out when they came up with the idea of depicting nocturnal animals partying the night away to promote Mountain Dew MDX. In fact, Kain saw it as a challenge to steer clear of making a spot “that my mom and grandmother would love and everybody in the industry would hate.”
To avoid turning off the hip, young audience they wanted to reach (and becoming a joke in ad circles), Kain and Arena smartly chose to stay away from casting oh-so-cute animals as the stars of “Nocturnal” and instead chose the decidedly odd creatures–an aye-aye, a tarsier and a bush baby, among others–that give the spot a dark, twisted feel.
“The aye-aye was fascinating to me because it’s a primate, a cousin of ours,” Kain shared, noting, “It was like we went on a safari without leaving the office.” Leading Kain and Franco on this safari was stock footage expert Susan Nickerson, president of Nickerson Research in Los Angeles. She tracked down all of the animal footage used in the spot, ultimately sourcing material from Marty Stouffer, BBC, Framepool, Footage Bank, Natural History New Zealand, Corbis and National Geographic.
There was no director involved in the making of “Nocturnal.” From the start, the agency was fairly certain it would be best to go with stock footage, although BBDO did have conversations with a few directors, senior producer Amy Wertheimer reported. “But once we saw all the fantastic [stock footage] that was out there,” she said, “we knew there was no way we’d replicate the great stuff we found by going out and shooting new footage.”
And, realistically, there simply wasn’t time to send a director out into the wild to get these exotic animals, which aren’t exactly easy to find, on film. “These nature filmmakers spend months hiding out, waiting to capture these animals,” BBDO executive creative director Bill Bruce pointed out.
It took Nickerson only a matter of days to pull tons of animal footage, which Kain and Franco then culled through to pick out scenes featuring not only the most oddball animals but animals that were looking directly at the camera. “They wanted to make something like a bad music video,” Bruce explained, “and singers always seem to be looking right into the camera in music videos.”
Editor Tom Muldoon of Nomad Editing Company, Santa Monica, cut “Nocturnal,” giving each animal his or her moment in the spotlight. Muldoon spent about a month–on and off–working on the project. “Tom’s awesome. He’s a part of the creative team on all of the projects [he cuts for BBDO],” Bruce praised. “He brings a lot to every one he does, especially this spot. He not only put it in order and gave it a form, he [choreographed the action] to hit the musical beats.”
“His first cut was not too far from where we ended up,” Kain added.
Once Muldoon’s work was done, the spot was sent to Framestore CFC, New York, where artisans completed the 2-D, 3-D and CG work necessary to make it appear as though the animals’ mouths were moving and their eyes were glowing.
Incidentally, the scene with the two bouncing bush babies initially featured just one bouncing bush baby. At the request of Kain and Arena, Flame artists Maryanne Lauric and Murray Butler seamlessly duplicated one bouncing bush baby into two, making the scene even more playful, Wertheimer said.
Framestore also added a night-vision look to the entire spot. “The night-vision look helped to give the spot a more uniform feel,” Muldoon said, noting that the footage he cut didn’t match up as it was shot on different film stocks and at different time periods.
The greenish night-vision tint also represents the color of Mountain Dew MDX, Arena pointed out.
While great effort went into making “Nocturnal” look great, getting the music down was crucial at the outset of the project. BBDO executive music producer Loren Parkins sought out songs that represented the night, and Richie’s 1980s classic “All Night Long” was the standout. “The more we looked at other songs in case we didn’t get this one, the more we knew we had to have this one,” Bruce commented.
Thankfully, the agency was able to secure the rights to “All Night Long.” Then it was up to sound designer Francois Blaignon of Nomad to cut the track down to a :30 version that needed to be approved by the client before the spot was cut. Given the slow build of the song, it was a challenge. “We liked the inaneness of some of the lyrics in the beginning of the song, but we needed to get to the chorus as well,” Bruce said.
“All Night Long” isn’t the only blast from the past that BBDO plans to hit us with, by the way. In the coming months, another Mountain Dew DMX spot featuring a breakout hit from the 1980s will debut.
