When it comes to The Wall Street Journal account, few creatives could match the enthusiasm of John Matejczyk of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners (GS&P). "I’m the biggest fan of the newspaper in the world," says the copywriter, who has worked at the San Francisco agency for two years. "I actually asked our creative director, Steve Simpson, if I could work on the account. I became hooked on the Journal seven or eight years ago; I couldn’t stop reading it."
Whether or not you share Matejczyk’s passion for the paper, odds are you’d be able to pick it out of a lineup—largely because of its distinctive, front-page illustrations. "People who never read the Journal—particularly art directors—they’ll say, ‘I don’t read the Journal, but I do like those little drawings they have,’ " he points out.
It was those "little drawings"—The Wall Street Journal’s trademark, black-and-white, stipple portraits of newsmakers—that inspired Matejczyk and art director Rick Casteel to create "Stipple Guy." The :60, which was also cut into a :30, features a fast-talking, animated pitchman with a very familiar look. After the sketchy spokesman lists the benefits of the Journal and its new news section, "Personal Journal," the camera pulls back to reveal that he is a living stipple portrait, speaking directly from the front page of the paper.
Though GS&P has had the account for close to four years, "this was the first campaign Rick and I had ever worked on for the Journal," Matejczyk relates. (He and Casteel came to GS&P from Young & Rubicam, Chicago, where they devised the award-winning "Worried About Bill" campaign for H&R Block.)
The Wall Street Journal had solicited the new campaign to announce its redesign of the front page, which now includes color elements, as well as the addition of the "Personal Journal" section, which offers features on the "business of life," such as personal finance. Several print ads were already underway when Matejczyk and Casteel were called on to contribute to the work. "First, we developed a campaign in print that compared the way the regular Wall Street Journal looks at a news story to the way the ‘Personal Journal’ looks at a story," Matejczyk recalls. "We took a left side/right side approach, where, on one side it would have the front page with ‘How To Run a Global IP Network.’ Then it would point to the ‘Personal Journal,’ which says, ‘How To Run Your PBA.’ It sounds easy now, but it took about fifteen campaigns from four teams to try to land on that. After the print was sold, we said, ‘How about the TV?’ "
Personal Approach
The creatives thought the TV spot (like the print ads) should focus on the "Personal Journal" and its unique approach to current events. But beyond that they were stumped—until Casteel took a good, long look at those "little drawings."
"Rick walked into my office with some of these stipple characters blown up really big on the Xerox," relates Matejczk. "He had actually dropped them into storyboard frames, and it looked really cool. So, we started writing some scripts to it."
As soon as the client approved the idea, the creatives began looking at animation companies. Ultimately, they decided to go with Wild Brain, San Francisco, a local shop that was completing work on a Dreyers Ice Cream campaign for GS&P. "In the original meeting, [the artists at Wild Brain] took three different approaches about how they could try to make this happen," he remembers.
For Wild Brain director Gordon Clark, the job was a challenge, to say the least. "The whole idea of the spot was that it had to look like [the Journal’s] very classic and precious illustrative style," Clark explains. "It means you had to have all these little tiny dots, and they had to move with the character. It was about the scariest idea possible for animation."
The creatives didn’t see it that way—at first. "We were so cocky. We couldn’t believe the animation company wanted a lot of money for this," Matejczyk laughs. "We thought, ‘Come on. Just do twelve frames per second. Just draw each one.’ "
That was much easier said than done, as the copywriter discovered. "If you hand-draw something like [a stipple portrait] and do twelve frames per-second, the dots and the lines cannot possibly line up with the previous dot and lines," notes Matejczyk. "The thing jumps around like crazy and looks like a vibrating mess."
"During the testing period, we had come up with a couple of things that, right off the bat, I knew we could do properly," Clark states. "I knew we could do a lot through rotowork—tracing off a live action. We had done some tests within the building. We shot some footage of me that was very simplistic, and we were able to do a lot of the outlines. Even though the hair looked hard at first, hair doesn’t move very much unless you’re in a stiff wind. So it actually wasn’t that difficult. What was really daunting was the shading—the dots in the middle of the face [on the Journal portraits].
"When you look at a photograph, or film or video of someone, there is a lot of information to trace from," he continues. "But when it gets to the super-subtle tones that define the contours within the face, there just isn’t any data in the photograph. All those dots are made up by an artist that is working for The Wall Street Journal."
Journal illustrator James Roberts flew across the country to serve as an artist/consultant, and Wild Brain animators began testing computer applications in order to reproduce those difficult dots. "We must have tried about eight or ten different things, and none of them worked," reports Clark. "We even tried making a 3-D model head [on the computer] and roto-ing that."
Finally, they found a solution. "It was a program called Reflex," Clark relates. "It’s a plug-in for After Effects, and it’s a 2-D morphing and warping program. We used the warping. We’d take The Wall Street Journal guy’s illustration, remove all the facial features and make the whole face, just defined in dots. Then we could use this program and warp those."
Combining rotoscoped live-action footage of a fast-talking actor (the live-action portion of the ad was directed by Jim Barton of Picture Park, Santa Monica and Boston) with Roberts’ stippled illustrations, 2-D animation and warping, Clark and company were finally able to put Stipple Guy in motion. "We basically placed the dot field [of the character’s face] with some tracking information that we had on the live action, and used the [Reflex] program," he says. "We were able to track the dots and make them move with the live action. The program was a godsend, and we found it more than at the last minute—after the last minute.
"It was really a combination of the technology and the operator," continues Clark. "I had tried similar [programs] with different people, and it didn’t work. They guy we had do the warping, Jance Allen, was amazing."
Despite its many challenges, the making of "Stipple Guy" was relatively short: just 11 weeks, from start to finish. "It was more like an effects job than an animation job," Clark observes, "because everything was done on top of live action."
As far as Matejczyk is concerned, it was a job well done: "[The process] was harder than we thought it would be, but I think it came out great."
These days, Matejczyk and Casteel are hard at work on a Hewlett Packard campaign, which, like The Wall Street Journal work, will include both print and broadcast ads. "We’re on the final stages of approval on the television right now," he reports. "We’re really happy with it."
