Defying the principle that you can only have two of the three values—good, fast and cheap—visual effects company Click 3x, New York, agreed to do a Comcast Digital Cable campaign. It took it on as a labor of love—love for the agency (Red Tettemer, Narberth, PA) and love for the campaign itself. "The situation was right all across the board," explained Jason Mayo, executive producer at Click 3x. "We had a relationship with the agency and when you enjoy working with people, it is a lot easier. A lot of people in the business-especially because times have been tough—are pitching aggressively to get jobs and a lot of people are slashing prices. So it is vary rare these days when a client isn’t pitching anybody else because they want to work with you and that is what happened here. Plus, it is a good brand, it has been in the news a lot and it is a brand everybody is familiar with. We also took a look at the boards and thought, ‘this could be a lot of fun.’"
The campaign is a series of eight :15 spots all done for under $50,000. Each is designed to show off a particular feature of Comcast Digital Cable’s service. The agency wanted to use iconic art-not too dissimilar from road sign symbols-to achieve a Flash animation-type look. The challenge however, was getting from one icon to the next. "Seamless was the theme of the project," said Mayo. "We took the icons and found ways to animate and move characters in and out of frame to create seamless transitions where one shape turns into another. There is a lot of eye candy, but you can’t just have things coming in and out of frame. You have to make smooth transitions from one character to another, from one scene to the next without really feeling like we are playing tricks on the eye."
The transitions occur to match the voiceover and many tricks are employed to achieve the seamless transitions. Icons are pulled, pushed, flipped and flopped. Some are pulled out of two dimensions and into three. Others are brought inward for a close up only to be a different shape altogether when the perspective is brought out again. A dinosaurs changes into a planet, a couch changes into movie theater seating, a guitar changes into a maraca-all without any edits. Each commercial ends with the Comcast logo materializing in the lower right corner. "It was also about deciding which shapes would make the nicest transition to the next shape," recounted Anthony Filipakis, 3D animator at Click 3x. "We had to look at the whole object in order to see which one would transition the best. That is why the dinosaur’s eye turns into the planet because they are both spheres. You don’t want some odd shape turning into another shape that doesn’t flow nicely."
The spots are very fast-paced and make their point quickly, efficiently but with style. Christine Lin, design director for Click 3x said the greatest challenge was keeping the transitions fresh. "The boards were really minimal," she said, "and the challenge was keeping it exciting and coming up with transitions that were surprising. In some of them you only have two objects to play with for fifteen seconds. We wanted to add life to the motion and keep the transitions as entertaining as possible."
While working on this project, Click 3x pumped out a spot every three or four days—a blinding speed considering the results. But according to Mayo, once they got going each commercial became easier to finish. "We had this rhythm going. It just seemed to flow from one to the next," Mayo described.
Some factors made this project, in actuality, a decent moneymaker for Click 3x. First, the agency was very agreeable-lending some credence to the theory that a low-budget project may be the best kind for keeping agencies off your back. The second was the decision to work in 3D-a decision made early on to reduce headaches for the animators. Third, the fast pace Click 3x was able to achieve after the first commercial was approved and out the door. "When it comes down to it," said Mayo, "the fact that we finished this project in three weeks, we wound up doing OK. We used in-house resources, we were smart about it, and the creatives were really cooperative in collaborating with us. We really didn’t have that many revisions, it really worked out. I don’t look at it as a losing proposition by any means."
