Stop motion directed by Abraham Spear of New York-headquartered Curious Pictures fuels a zany campaign for the BC Dairy Foundation out of DDB Canada’s Vancouver office.
Our featured spot from the package is “Giant Monster” which is reminiscent of the campy Godzilla movies from yesteryear but sans the bad dubbing. A huge reptilian creature seems poised to terrorize a city. But instead of leaving behind a giant swath of destruction, our protagonist monster ends up leaving with a whimper, vowing to do better the next time.
The scenario is made all the more comical by the monster’s imposing physical presence. After all he’s as tall as the giant skyscrapers which surround him, and his footprint can cover a city intersection.
At first the bustling city at his feet seems in a state of chaos. We see cars collide, people running about, screaming in hysterics. Police cars racing around. But as it turns out, there’s really not all that much to get worked up about.
The monster attempts to set the city aflame with his fire-breathing prowess. But he barely musters enough firepower to light a candle. And on his second attempt, he coughs, generating a couple meager puffs of smoke.
Onto plan two which calls for him to exhibit his physical strength. The beast rears back and punches the side of a skyscraper. The building remains intact but our gargantuan reptile suffers bruised knuckles and let’s out an “ow.”
As he makes his way deeper into the city, he finally shows some physical might, swiping at the top of a giant crane, causing it to come full circle. The only problem is that the crane rig swings around and hits the creature in the back of the head.
Toy soldiers defending the city laugh at the monster’s weakness and ineptitude.
Our fearsome creature then makes his retreat, favoring his back as if he’s in need of a giant tube of Ben Gay.. He slithers away into the river on the outskirts of this Gotham-like metropolis. As he is about to fade from view and become totally immersed in the water, we hear him say, “Must drink more milk.”
Those four words then appear as a tagline on screen, accompanied by a .com, spelling out a website address for the BC Dairy Foundation
DDB Canada Vancouver collaborated with digital shop Tribal DDB Canada on the web component of the campaign, which consisted of the special website (www.mustdrinkmoremilk.com) and web virals posted to YouTube.
One of six “Giant Monster” is one of six Spear-helmed TV :30s in this campaign, three more of which are yet to break. Spear recently wrapped “Giant Monster” and “Foosball,” which pick up on where the initial spot, “Teen Power Team” left off. The latter showed teen super heroes morphing into powerful beasts, except for the last one who can only muster a transformation into a meager gerbil. He too comes to the conclusion, “Must drink more milk.”
“In Foosball,” we are thrust onto a foosball table where the blue team clearly has the edge as players pull off astonishing tricks with the ball. One blue player fires off a bullet of a shot that takes off the head of one of the hapless red defenders. As the head rolls across the field and comes to a rest, the voiceover presumably from the decapitated player coos, “Note to self: must drink more milk!”
The spots are a mix of traditional stop-motion techniques and After Effects work, which Spear said was used to enhance some of the stop-motion shots.
Spear credited the DDB core creative team of senior art director Dan Strasser and senior copywriter Kevin Rathgeber for having an innate love of the stop-motion form. “They wanted something in the animation genre, but weren’t entirely sure if they wanted to go with CGI, 2-D, 3-D or some combination of techniques,” said Spear.
Caring treatment To win the job, Spear created a stop-motion style scene from each script, photographed each and presented this along with his treatment to the agency to illustrate what this campaign might visually look like. His creative team at Curious also performed a few motion tests, which helped sell the creatives on the project.
The entire process took five months from when the job was first awarded to completion. During this time, six oversized sets were built on the Curious stop-motion stage, including the massive “Giant Monster” cityscape, which was built on a four-foot riser with three trap doors so that animators could get into its interior and manipulate the puppets and props.
