Created by FCB New York and animated by London-based Loose Moose, a stop-frame animated spot for new Chips Ahoy! CremeWiches cleverly depicts how the cookie was first made.
For those of you who haven’t snacked on CremeWiches yet: They consist of a creme filling with Chips Ahoy! chocolate chip cookies on either side. Since the product is new, the creative team at FCB wanted to show consumers exactly what it is made of. "But we didn’t want to show a factory making it. We wanted to do something fun and unexpected," FCB copywriter Gerald Cuesta related.
While trying to come up with an idea, Cuesta one day found himself sandwiched between two large people on a subway train: "I was stuck in the middle," he recalled, "and I thought, ‘That’s what the creme must feel like squeezed between those two cookies.’ " A concept was born.
The creative team decided that stop-frame animation was the best way to illustrate this idea and make it appealing to both children and adults, so Loose Moose was hired to produce a :30 called "Bus." (There is also a :15 version of the ad.) The spot opens on a pear-shaped blob of white creme—complete with eyes and mouth—sitting on a bus. On one side of him is a skateboard punk, on the other a woman holding a toddler.
Cut to two Chips Ahoy! cookies—they also have faces—boarding the bus as a guitar-based rock track begins. "Uh, excuse me," says one of the cookies as he squeezes himself onto the seat between the woman and the creme. "Pardon me, buddy," echoes the other as he jams himself onto the seat between the skateboard punk and the creme.
As the two cookies press against the creme, his eyes widen, his mouth opens, and he breaks into song: "I’m squeezed in the middle, smack dab in the middle …"
Everyone joins the creme in singing and keeping time to the catchy tune, including the bus driver and the rest of the passengers. As the song heats up, the skateboard punk shakes his fist in the air to the music. A voiceover breaks in: "When you put tasty creme smack dab in the middle of two Chips Ahoy! cookies, some pretty amazing things happen."
Cut to a shot of the toddler leaning off his mother’s lap to get a better look at the now-three-layered cookie, then to a shot of the back of the moving bus, which displays a sign promoting the new dessert. As the bus zooms forward, the voiceover states, "New Chips Ahoy! CremeWiches."
Back inside the bus, the toddler chomps on one part of the cookie. "Hey, he bit me!" the cookie yells.
The spot is amazingly detailed. All of the characters have distinct looks and expressions. There are banner ads for various products inside the bus, and as it moves you can see buildings and trees out the windows. The puppets were created by U.K. shops Mackinnon and Saunders, Manchester, and Artem Ltd., Perivale, Middlesex.
Loose Moose director/animator Ken Lidster says he was attracted to the juxtaposition of these average, everyday people taking a bus with a cookie and not noticing that the situation is, well, weird. "It is surreal," admitted Lidster.
FCB came to Loose Moose with little time to get the job done. "The scariest thing about it was they had an airdate already, and it was seven weeks out," according to Lidster. "Usually with this kind of animation, ten or twelve weeks is the realistic time frame."
But because the creative team at FCB was so organized, Loose Moose was able to complete the job on time. "They were really one of the better agencies that we’ve worked with," Lidster praised, noting that FCB came to Loose Moose with a solid script.
Once Loose Moose was onboard, the first part of the process involved designing the characters. Lidster said the creme was actually his biggest challenge. "As we sat there designing that, we were like, ‘Well, it looks like a ghost. Now, it looks like a blob of poo,’ " he recalled, adding that the FCB team instructed him to "think of the creme as Woody Allen-like, a nebbish. The cookies were supposed to be more Rocky Balboa."
During the design phase, Lidster shared sketches and other material with the creative team at FCB via the Internet.
The creative team was on the set for some of the shoot. "The storyboards were pretty well thought out, but one of the surprises for us was that in stop-frame animation [so] much of it happens right there when you’re shooting," observed FCB producer Steve Friedman, pointing out that the skateboard punk’s arm-wave, for example, was "ad-libbed."
Howie Ronay, FCB co-art director with Chris Lombardo also spent time on the set. "I was there for a week, and I found what you really have to watch is not only the action but the speed at which the action is done," Ronay reported. "What we noticed the first day was that some of the motion started looking hyperactive." Obviously, that was corrected.
Incidentally, Ronay had the honor of having one of the spot’s characters –a man standing toward the back of the bus looking out the window—modeled after him. "I’m the guy with the maniacal scary smile," he noted.
While the animation had to be perfect, the music was also a key component of the spot. Los Angeles-based rock musician Chris Seefried of 2 Virgins, Los Angeles, composed the rock ‘n’ roll track, which Cuestra describes as somewhere between "the Ramones and the Replacements." According to Cuesta, this was the first time that Seefried has composed music for a commercial. Why go with a first-timer? "We wanted to do a song that could hold its own as a song and not just be a jingle," explained Cuesta. "We wanted to write a mini-rock song, and we thought Chris—being a touring rock musician—would be the perfect person."
In the end, the concept, animation and music come together to formulate a spot that "makes everyone who sees it smile, no matter what their age," Cuesta said. "When we were in London editing, we were dealing with hardened sound mixers and editors and so forth, and they all smiled, and said, ‘Wow, that’s really cool.’ And they’ve seen a million things, so that made us feel we’d done a good job."
