This past advertising awards season, Honda Diesel’s “Grrr” started its engine and never looked back. One of the most honored commercials in recent years, its string of accolades include the Cannes Grand Prix, the Grand Clio at the Clio Festival, Best of Show at the One Show, two Golds in the D&AD Awards, the GRANDY at the ANDYs, inclusion in the AICP Show, and most recently, the Grand Prix at the 43rd annual Shark Awards (SHOOT, 9/23, p/ 1).
The animated :90 from Wieden + Kennedy, London, was directed by Smith & Foulkes–Adam and Allen–of London-based Nexus Productions. Founded by producers Chris O’Reilly and Charlotte Bavasso, Nexus is a digital animation production company for long and short-form content, which sees a project through from idea origination, character design and storyboarding right through animation to postproduction.
“Grrr” tells a story through song and animation of a Honda engineer who hated what was a standard diesel engine–so he came up with something better. The spot features diesel engines flying through an animated world populated with rainbows and bunnies, who aim to rid their world of the former engines. The spot asks, “Can Hate Be Good?” In the case of Honda, the answer is yes.
“The concept of ‘positive hate’ very much came from the agency’s song,” recalls O’Reilly. “We sat around a table with [copywriters] Michael [Ruffoff], Sean [Thompson] and Richard [Russell], with Michael on guitar, Richard on vocals and Sean whistling. We were hooked! We had the brief of designing a universe for this song–a whole world of optimistic hate. We went back to the studio and discussed various ways of visualizing this. We wanted something epic but that perfectly matched the tone and humor of the song and was above all a celebration of optimism. We were inspired by Chinese poster art and the way it envisaged a ‘better tomorrow’ and the manicured and designed worlds of theme parks, Japanese gardens and golf courses.
“All this went into the big melting pot of Smith & Foulkes and their team–they had the first visual, which was the idea of bunnies wearing ear protectors shooting the engines out of the sky in beautiful choreographed symmetry. We went back to the agency and they loved it. We then spent a good month honing the animatic with Smith & Foulkes generating tons of ideas as to how the engines were destroyed by cute things, working very closely with the agency creatives, until we had the final board.
“Then it was a case of a huge team of 3-D animators, riggers, modelers, matte painters, and lighting artists spending a further 10 weeks putting this all together in painstaking detail,” adds O’Reilly.
Housed in a 5,000-square-foot studio based in London’s Shoreditch district, Nexus is currently working in SD, HD and 2k data. The company’s 3-D tool is 3ds max 7 from Autodesk Media and Entertainment (formerly Discreet), with animation tool Character Studio and rendering from Splutterfish’s Brazil. For compositing, the studio uses both Adobe After Effects and Autodesk’s Combustion. The 2-D department is led by Reece Millidge, and the head of 3-D is Darren Price, who will be presenting “Grrr” at the eDIT8 Festival in Frankfurt this weekend, as part of a commercial visual effects panel put on by the festival in collaboration with SHOOT.
“Honda ‘Grr’ has been an awards phenomenon, and it has opened more doors,” relates O’Reilly. “It’s had the biggest impact on Smith & Foulkes as directors and has really given them the kind of high profile they deserved. Given it came alongside several other very good pieces from them that year, I think it’s meant that people have recognized their versatility too and they are involved in some very different looking projects. But Smith & Foulkes aren’t the only directors to have made a big impact on our profile over the last couple of years, and all the directors on the roster together have created some work we’re all really proud of.”
The Nexus directing roster comprises animation talent across a broad range of styles and techniques that O’Reilly says puts emphasis on combining strong storytelling abilities with design excellence. In addition to Smith & Foulkes, the roster includes Kuntzel + Deygas, Woof Wan-Bau, Jonas Odell, Bessy & Combe, Jim Le Fevre, Tom & Mark Perrett, Celyn Brazier, Jonas & Boris, Sam Morrison, Nagi Noda, Glenn Marshall and Satoshi Tomioka.
The company’s resume is diverse. In features and television, it includes the titles to Dreamworks’ Catch Me If You Can, the animated film included within Paramount and DreamWorks’ Lemony Snicket’s A Series Of Unfortunate Events, and the animated titles to Working Title’s Thunderbirds, as well over two hours of animated comedy for the BBC and Talkback TV series Monkey Dust. Commercial credits include work for Microsoft, Yahoo, Sony PlayStation, Nike, BMW, Panasonic, X-Box and Ask Jeeves.
Smith & Foulkes’ recent work includes a pair of spots–“Cheetah” and “Sleeping Beauty”–for the SNCF (la Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer), the French national rail organization, for their regional rail service, TER (Train Express Regional). The spots were co-produced with Wanda Productions in Paris and commissioned by TBWA, Paris. They were produced over a period of 13 weeks at Nexus.
“Cheetah” features hungry cheetahs competing with one another in various motor vehicles to catch a single bounding gazelle–but they face severe congestion on the Savannah highways. The happily escaped gazelle is then seen perched on a supposedly safe and cheetah-free hilltop. However, a train suddenly pulls up beside the tasty animal whose doors open to reveal a winking, ravenous-looking cheetah.
The second spot is based upon the well-known story of Sleeping Beauty. Here, Prince Charming’s butler informs him that the time has come for Sleeping Beauty to be kissed and awoken. The prince leaps into his awaiting motor vehicle, but en route he discovers that several other local princes have also been alerted to Sleeping Beauty’s imminent awakening. The result is an angry pile-up; meanwhile the princess is confronted by the initial prince’s butler, who arrived on the TER.
“The scripts gave us a great opportunity to do two straight-up, no-holes-barred, animation romps,” read a statement from the directing duo. “We really had to keep the momentum going from frame one. The agency was keen that they stood up to repeated viewing so there are a lot of details put in that you don’t have time to take in initially. They also had to look very stylish so we brought an Art Nouveau aesthetic to the design of the characters and sets, and tried to capture the atmosphere of the African Savannah and a Bavarian Fairy Tale.”
Projecting ahead, O’Reilly comments “We’re looking to continue seeking creative opportunities in commercial filmmaking–We’re also now developing long-form animation projects and that promises to be really exciting.”
When asked about his view on the emerging area of branded entertainment, he responds, “I think it will still require directors that are great storytellers with unique design sensibilities, and that is the heart of Nexus.
“Technology is obviously making a huge impact on how people see commercial messages, but technology is only innovative for the briefest time, he adds. “Very soon it’s old hat and we are left with the question, ‘is the message striking and relevant?’ We aim to house the talent that can achieve this.
“Nexus is involved in wider aspects of animation than simply commercials and music videos–I think this gives us a great platform from which to work with clients to develop alternatives to the 30-second spot.”
