By Christine Champagne

Celebrities, including the likes of Betty White and Joe Pesci, have been featured in the Snickers “You’re not you when you’re hungry”-themed commercials. But BBDO New York went with a non-human star this time around, casting Godzilla in a :30 spot appropriately titled “Godzilla.” As we see in the commercial directed by Ulf Johansson of Smith and Jones Films, which has offices in Los Angeles and London, Godzilla is really a fun, charismatic dude who likes to waterski, ride all-terrain vehicles and play ping pong with his bros. He even dances at a party. But when Godzilla gets hungry he turns into, well, a monster. Thankfully, his friends know to feed him a Snickers to turn him back into chill Godzilla.

So why cast Godzilla in the latest Snickers ad as opposed to another Hollywood celeb? “It started with a brief to see if we could try to take the campaign in a different direction executionally,” said BBDO executive creative director Peter Kain. “We’ve brought the basic idea of how hunger changes your personality to life with the celebrities over the years, and we’ll probably continue to do that, but we felt like maybe there was another way executionally, and we loved this idea that the creative team Alex Taylor and Jason Stefanik [creative directors as well as copywriter and art director, respectively] had because it used Godzilla, obviously a character people know and love, and it’s a twist on the campaign.”

As the agency began researching the character, it was discovered that a new Godzilla movie starring Bryan Cranston of Breaking Bad fame was set for release in May of this year, and BBDO contacted Warner Bros. behind the reboot. “It is non-traditional for a movie promotion to be inside a commercial, but they saw potential in it and embraced it, and so we produced it with their help,” Kain explained.

Like in the original movies, the Godzilla we see in the commercial is, of course, a guy in a Godzilla suit. The crew at Legacy Effects in San Fernando, Calif., constructed the suit, consulting with Warner Bros. and relying on specs from Japanese film studio Toho, which owns the rights to the character. “It’s made out of latex, and they actually put cornflakes in the latex to give [Godzilla’s skin] texture. That’s how they made the suits back in the 1950s,” according to BBDO executive creative director Gianfranco Arena, who added, “This one is a little bit more advanced. It looks like the suit from the ’50s, however, there’s some animatronics for eye movement and mouth movement.”

Once the beast was ready to go, Johansson and his crew, including DP Andrejz Sekula, shot Godzilla in action all around the Los Angeles-area over three days. While an actor/puppeteer was inside the suit and controlled the arms and legs, two puppeteers from Legacy operated the animatronic parts of Godzilla, moving his eyes, eyebrows, cheeks and ears. “Shooting was tough as someone had to be in the suit, and it took 30 minutes to get out, and the actor couldn’t stay in there for more than one to two hours,” Amy Wertheimer, BBDO group executive producer, shared.

It was important to both the director and the agency to shoot as much as possible in-camera with a real Godzilla on set. “Building a suit gave Godzilla an authentic look and feel as opposed to building Godzilla in CG after shooting. It allowed Godzilla to physically hang out with the guys, resulting in organic chemistry amongst them, so they’d feel as if they’d known each other and were true friends,” Wertheimer said.
There were a couple of instances, though, where scenes couldn’t be shot for real. It wouldn’t have been possible to have the guy in the Godzilla suit waterski, for example, so a water-skier, outfitted with Godzilla legs, was brought in to perform the stunt. That footage was later married together with green-screen footage of the rest of Godzilla’s body by the artisans at MPC New York.

By the way, that scene of Godzilla riding the all-terrain vehicle and making a jump was done for real, Arena pointed out. That’s impressive. “It seemed pretty easy when he did it on the day, but it took a lot of practice,” Arena said.

When it came time for the edit, putting the :30 together was challenging because there was really only :28 for all the action—:02 had to be set aside for a tag, Kain said. But editor Ian Mackenzie of New York-based Mackenzie Cutler was able to work a number of scenarios into the short timeframe without making things feel rushed.

Music was also an important element of the spot. “We wanted the music to be the opposite of whatever you would expect to go with Godzilla,” Kain said. “We wanted it to be as fun as the picture.”

Ultimately, creative director/composer Jon Darling of South Music & Sound Design in Santa Monica came up with an upbeat, guitar-oriented track to complement the action, and BBDO licensed a few seconds of ominous stock music from London’s AKM Music to accompany Godzilla’s few moments of destruction.

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