Director Peter Coffin Of Passion Paris Asks, "What's In Your Tub?"
By Robert Goldrich
Consider it Burns and Allen with a bovine twist. A couple of CG cow characters, Anchor Cow and his younger sidekick Moo, are the straight man and the ditzy punch-line deliverer, respectively, in this :30 titled “Look Out” for Anchor Spreadable, a buttery like dairy spread, via London agency Clemmow Hornby Inge.
The two CG cows interact in a live-action setting. The spot opens with Anchor Cow standing under the shade of a tree. A twig falls on his head, causing him to look up where he surprisingly finds his buddy Moo sitting on a tree branch, looking intently into the distance.
“What are you doing up there?” Anchor asks Moo.
“I’m looking for additives,” says Moo, an offbeat explanation ripe for a George Burns-like response (“Looking for additives, Gracie?”).
Indeed Anchor incredulously replies, “Looking for additives?”
“Yes, you get them in buttery flavored spreads, but not in Anchor Spreadable,” relates Moo.
“Do you actually know what additives look like?” queries Anchor.
“No, but there’s a strange thing over there that looks like a cloud with legs,” notes Moo.
“That’s a sheep,” says Anchor.
The spot then ends on a product shot of an Anchor Spreadable package. A voiceover then asks, “What’s in your tub?”
The core creative team at Clemmow Hornby Inge consisted of art director Micky Tudor, copywriter Brian Turner and producer Enca Kaul.
Peter Coffin directed “Look Out” via Passion Paris, an office recently opened by Passion Pictures, London. Coffin helmed the live action while also directing and animating the characters. The live-action DP was Jean Poisson. The live-action line producer was Alexandre Meliava. Emilie Walmsley and Nicolas Trout were producers in the U.K. and France, respectively. Hugo Sands was the executive producer for Passion Pictures.
“It was important to me that the live action was shot using the style of a hand-held camera, like a documentary,” said Coffin. “I find that CG characters which are composited into hand-held live action initially look quite surprising to the viewer and enable us to believe in them as real characters more easily than if the camera is locked off.” The spot deployed a Sony 750 HD camera. The CG models were built and animated in Maya. The animation was rendered and composited using proprietary tools at Paris studio MacGuff Ligne.
Passion Paris maintains a partnership with MacGuff Ligne, which enables Passion to access MacGuff’s animation and effects artisans, tools and resources. Working via MacGuff was a contingent of artists that included: CG modeling artists Virgine Taravel and Mathieu Trintzius; CG animation artists Kyle Balda, Frantz Vidal and Mirco Tomadini; renderers Fabien Pollack, Selim Draia and Mathieu Gross; and compositors Sebastien Rey and Celine Allegre. Visual effect supervisor was Etienne Pecheux. Postproduction coordination at MacGuff was handled by Laleh Sahrai, Christelle Balcon and Catherine Bernet.
Voiceover artists were comedians Stephen Fry and Tony Robinson.
Google Opens Its Defense In Antitrust Case Alleging Monopoly Over Online Ad Technology
Google opened its defense against allegations that it holds an illegal monopoly on online advertising technology Friday with witness testimony saying the industry is vastly more complex and competitive than portrayed by the federal government.
"The industry has been exceptionally fluid over the last 18 years," said Scott Sheffer, a vice president for global partnerships at Google, the company's first witness at its antitrust trial in federal court in Alexandria.
The Justice Department and a coalition of states contend that Google built and maintained an illegal monopoly over the technology that facilitates the buying and selling of online ads seen by consumers.
Google counters that the government's case improperly focuses on a narrow type of online ads — essentially the rectangular ones that appear on the top and on the right-hand side of a webpage. In its opening statement, Google's lawyers said the Supreme Court has warned judges against taking action when dealing with rapidly emerging technology like what Sheffer described because of the risk of error or unintended consequences.
Google says defining the market so narrowly ignores the competition it faces from social media companies, Amazon, streaming TV providers and others who offer advertisers the means to reach online consumers.
Justice Department lawyers called witnesses to testify for two weeks before resting their case Friday afternoon, detailing the ways that automated ad exchanges conduct auctions in a matter of milliseconds to determine which ads are placed in front of which consumers and how much they cost.
The department contends the auctions are finessed in subtle ways that benefit Google to the exclusion of would-be competitors and in ways that prevent... Read More