Kissing a smoker is like kissing an ashtray. That’s the point made in the :30 “Rec Room,” a daringly gross anti-smoking spot for the Washington State Department of Health aimed at 11 to 14-year-olds.
Created by Sedgwick Rd., Seattle, and directed by Chel White of Portland’s Bent Image Lab, the stop-motion animation ad finds a boy and a girl watching TV in a darkened recreation room. It’s clearly a date. The boy is about to lean in for a kiss when a mangy orange cat pukes up a hairball on the rug. While the boy goes to investigate, the girl sits primping on the couch. When the boy returns and goes in for a kiss again, the girl pulls away in repulsion–his mouth is crammed full of cat puke. As she walks away in disgust, a message appears on the screen of the television they had been watching. It reads: “Kissing a smoker is just as gross” and refers viewers to AshtrayMouth.com.
The spot–or at least the climax of the spot–is disgusting. But “Rec Room” is a haunting piece of film–eerily beautiful at moments–that shares an anti-smoking message jaded kids might actually pay attention to.
Anti-smoking spots generally fixate on the health risks of smoking, and that can be an effective tact when you’re trying to reach adults. But the “Hey, you could die of lung cancer” preaching doesn’t resonate with all young people. “The whole 11 to 14-year old target audience doesn’t really identify with the concept of mortality. Not every 11 to 14-year-old thinks they’re going to smoke and die,” maintained Sedgwick Rd. copywriter Scott Stripling. “But they might care about the immediate social consequences. Every 14-year-old is interested in the opposite sex.”
Sedgwick Rd. knows its audience. The agency has been working with the Washington State Department of Health on its anti-smoking campaign for four years now, generating a body of work that has included more typical anti-smoking messages addressing topics such as health concerns and premature aging, and the work has been successful–Washington State currently boasts one of the lowest teen-smoking rates in the country at just under 20 percent, Stripling’s colleague, Sedgwick Rd. associate creative director Zach Hitner, reported. The hope is that edgier spots like “Rec Room,” with its unique take on why smoking isn’t appealing, will reach those youth who remain at-risk.
The creative team at Sedgwick Rd. didn’t have to just settle on a concept for its latest campaign (which also includes the :30 “Park”). They had to decide the best way to execute it, and both live action and animation were options. But, according to Hitner, there were two factors that led them to go with animation–stop-motion in particular. “One [factor] was with animation we could push it a lot further. We could be a lot more graphic with it without having to get into issues of realism, and it just made it more palatable to see it in this animated way,” Hitner explained. “Secondly, it cuts through. You see the spot come on the air and it looks unlike anything else that’s out there, and we get to cut through the clutter.”
The biggest challenge for White as a director upfront was nailing down the look of the boy doll and the girl doll. “We actually went through quite a few incarnations of the dolls. We kept making the eyes bigger and lower on the face and the mouth and nose smaller,” White recalled. “It was finding a look of real innocence but then [juxtaposing it] with the fact that they were doing things that weren’t all that innocent.”
The doe-eyed dolls are remarkably restrained in their emotions. “Going into this, I really knew–and the agency was in total agreement–that we didn’t want their emotions to be big. We wanted them to be really restrained and subtle,” White shared.
Why? “For me, it was a couple things. I think it communicates a little bit more vulnerability and innocence to have them react more subtly, and I like the mood and the style of it. A lot of animated characters are big, everything’s big and bouncy, and expressions are exaggerated, and that has its place,” White mused, “but I really felt like these needed to be the opposite of that.”
White put just as much thought into the camera work. The camera glides through the recreation room at times as if it is on autopilot, then suddenly moves in a stilted, jerky fashion. “I’ve called it a surveillance camera gone berserk, but that’s not exactly right. I wanted something about the camera to be uneasy. It moved quickly and mechanically, and there was something kind of jarring about that that [enhanced] the mood, the tension, especially when you get to the point where you reveal something that’s rather repugnant,” said White.
The music and sound design also contribute to the tension built up in “Rec Room.” Composer/arranger Eric Johnson of Clatter & Din, Seattle, created a haunting track for the spot reminiscent of something you’d hear emanating from an old music box.
Reflecting on their first foray into the world of animation, Stripling and Hitner were impressed by White and his crew. “The great thing about working with Chel and all the guys at Bent is they are artists first. They do a lot of commercial work, but they truly are artists,” Stripling praised.
Stripling still marvels over the time that he and Hitner spent at the Bent studio. “Bent was like this little Santa’s workshop,” he said laughing. “You’d see a seamstress sewing a little hooded sweatshirt, and you’d have a guy next to her building the cat.”
If you look closely at “Rec Room,” by the way, you’ll spy some cute touches. The word “Bent” appears on the boy’s t-shirt, and the cat pictured on the girl’s top was drawn by White’s 12-year-old daughter Marika. White actually consulted Marika and his 10-year-old daughter Aniko as well throughout the making of “Rec Room,” getting their feedback. “I showed it to both of them at different points, and they thought it was really cool. They really liked the dolls. They thought they were amazing,” White said, adding, “I knew we were on the right track [with the spot] when I got such a favorable response from them.”
Incidentally, “Rec Room” (and “Park,” too), which can both be seen at AshtrayMouth.com, will more than likely air in television markets all over the country in the coming weeks and months. According to Hitner, both spots have been entered into an anti-smoking database full of work that various health agencies and organizations can access and use.
