To tout its status as one of the world’s foremost eBusiness software leaders, Computer Associates (CA) wanted to send a wake-up call to the general public. Such a tall order called for a powerful alarm—from thousands of roosters.
This is the concept of the CA spot "Wake Up," out of Young & Rubicam, New York, that was directed by Phil Joanou of Villains, bicoastal and Chicago, with visual effects created by Sight Effects, Venice, Calif. The ad is highlighted by a seamless integration of live action and CG effects. Using various Manhattan cityscapes as settings, the spot features roosters that—by cab, subway or on foot—are seen heading purposefully to a destination, ready to rouse the city.
The ad opens on a pre-dawn morning as a lone rooster high-tails it across the Brooklyn Bridge; low-angle shots of roosters walking on a street near the Flatiron building follow. Subsequent shots reveal the roosters on the early-morning streets of SoHo and Times Square; one particularly charming sequence has three of the fowl situated atop a speeding cab.
"You’ve awakened to the true power of eBusiness …," a voiceover states. Dramatic tension builds as bevies of roosters disembark from a subway train, emerging from a station identified as Wall Street. "… Do you have the power to manage it?"
The spot’s payoff begins with an overhead shot revealing that a flock of roosters has converged in the Wall Street district. Assorted camera angles capture the assembled multitudes as rays of light from the rising sun illuminate the area. The voiceover admonishes, "If not, this is your wake-up call."
This sets off the tremendous crowing of a rooster, and its ear-splitting volume generates a huge sonic shock wave. The circular shock wave emanates from the ground, moving outward. The tremors wreak havoc on the nearby area, overturning a bus and other objects in their path. This is followed by an extreme pullback, created with visual effects, in which the shock wave travels from the city out into space.
"Our software manages more eBusiness than anyone on earth," states the voiceover. "Hello, tomorrow. We are Computer Associates, the software that manages eBusiness." The spot ends with the CA logo.
"CA is the third-largest independent software company in the world [behind IBM and Microsoft], and no one knows them," related Ann Hayden, managing partner/creative at Y&R. "Because of software becoming such a strategic part of business in this e-domain, we felt it was time for people outside of the technology realm to know who they were."
The Y&R creative team for "Wake Up" included Hayden, creative director/art director Ahmer Kalam, creative director/copywriter Rachel Howald, managing partner/director of broadcast production Ken Yagoda, who produced, and assistant producer Salima Mathews.
Joanou shot the background plates in New York over five days in late November. Due to the impossibility of directing live roosters on location, a combination of live birds shot on stage against bluescreen, and CG fowl were composited into scenes. Sight Effects’ Alan Barnett and Adrian Hurley were visual effects supervisors. Barnett said that their approach was to shoot as many roosters as possible against bluescreen for the correct angles, and to supplement those with CG images. The CG was utilized for wide shots, and for close-ups "where we couldn’t get the right performances we wanted from the roosters, or we didn’t have time on stage to cover all the shots." The job’s tight four-week schedule ruled out a wholly CG spot, as it wasn’t possible to create realistic-looking birds for the very tight close-ups," explained Barnett.
Joanou said they shot multiple passes for all the plates, to capture the sky, the foreground and background elements. A thick cloud cover helped achieve the spot’s pre-dawn look. Eight stuffed roosters were filmed for reference during the live action shoot, to line up angles and capture appropriate lighting, reflection and shadows. One of the challenges was shooting without motion-control, which was judged too time-consuming. "We tried to compensate for no motion control by keeping moves relatively simple: no panning, fixed focal lengths," said Barnett. "But there’s one complicated shot: a hand-held move tracking backwards down the bridge with the roosters running at you. The trick was to time everything so that the roosters make correct contact on the ground and look like they’re in the shot."
This was followed by two days of filming around 15 birds on stage. The roosters are trainable up to a point; for instance, they will run from one cage to another in order to get food. This worked when they had to run left to right (or vice versa), but getting them to run away from or towards camera was much harder. This required the skills of five blue-suited wranglers wielding blue sticks to "direct" them.
"You can’t shoot with more than one rooster at a time, because they like to fight," related Joanou. Also vexing was the roosters’ refusal to crow after being taken out of their cage and brought into the light for a 5 a.m. call. "We had boomboxes playing with recorded rooster crowing, which supposedly makes them want to crow. So we’d be rolling, rolling … and nothing. Finally I said, ‘Forget it—let’s cut,’ and, I swear, as soon as we turned off the camera, they’d crow. So we rolled again and pretended to cut, and only then they crowed. They were just spiteful little beasts," quipped Joanou.
A key CG effect came at the spot’s end, where the POV pulls out of Manhattan into space. It was created by combining a helicopter shot moving down into the city, which was reversed, with a match move on a CG earth, Barnett related. The shock wave itself was created in Inferno, using assorted displacement and lighting effects. Sight Effects and its in-house animation shop, In-Sight Pix, spent nearly four weeks on the post, with four to five Infernos and three to four CGI Maya workstations going at any given time.
Joanou noted that he wanted the spot to have "a certain whimsical fairytale quality to it, but also to be believable. So we tried for really believable compositing. You really feel like the roosters are walking through Times Square."
