In an effort to capture the attention of the tween market, Element 79 Partners in Chicago recently debuted “Big Head,” a :30 spot that finds the oversized noggins of professional athletes Derek Jeter, Peyton Manning, Kevin Garnett, Dwyane Wade and Jennie Finch attached to the bodies of a group of rambunctious kids at play.
The work of an Element 79 Partners creative team made up of creative director Jon Flannery, copywriter Jim Paul and art director Max Stinson, “Big Head” is fun and lighthearted, and the big-headed athletes with their little bodies and high-pitched voices are cute, endearing even.
Flannery is happy to hear that assessment. The agency was going for a charming, playful vibe, although this spot could have just as easily turned creepy with the players looking like bobblehead dolls or aliens if not executed just right. “We were definitely afraid of that happening,” Element 79 Partners producer Tom Cronin acknowledged with a laugh.
Therefore, great care went into selecting a director, and Dante Ariola of bicoastal/international MJZ won the job, which marked his first collaboration with the agency.
Why Ariola? “When everybody here [at the agency] met as a group, we said, ‘We really want to find somebody who is going to think of this in a smart way,’ ” Cronin shared. “And Dante’s reel represented tremendous thinking on his part.”
Once the agency began talking to the director, “He didn’t come out and say, ‘This is how it should be done,’ ” Flannery noted. “He wanted to talk at length with a lot of different people about how to best do this.”
Ariola ultimately teamed with Asylum in Santa Monica, Calif.. He has enjoyed successful collaborations with the visual effects shop before–the fruits of their labor include the Juicy Fruit “Ant” spot out Chicago’s Energy BBDO, a former SHOOT Top Spot of the Week.
WRAP YOUR HEAD AROUND THIS When Mitch Drain, VFX supervisor at Asylum, saw the boards for “Big Head,” he recalled thinking that the task looked “incredibly difficult. I hadn’t really seen anything quite like it done before.” While there were various options, including the creation of CG heads and the use of masks, it was decided that it was best to go the real route, shooting the athletes for real and the kids for real and melding the two together.
An approach carefully worked out, Ariola and DP Toby Irwin, with Drain on location to advise them, began the process by shooting footage of a group of children playing on the front lawn of a suburban home in South Pasadena, Calif.
To get the framing perfect, the kids were fitted with a prop head forty percent larger than an adult head, and camera lineup was done. “Once we had our camera lineup, we took that off and let the kids perform,” Drain says.
The kids performed their moves wearing beanies with tracking markers on them; they also had tracking markers on their faces.
Once the footage of the kids was in the can, the crew traveled to Minnesota and Miami to shoot the athletes. Essentially, the athletes stood in front of a green screen and mimicked the action of the kids, which was shown to them via a monitor placed next to the camera. Thanks to quick test composites done right on set, Ariola and Drain were able to see which takes worked best.
The athletes really got into the process, Drain said, noting, “Surprisingly enough, we got through the [shots] really quickly. These guys are athletes. They know how to control their bodies, and they were really hitting their marks amazingly well.”
When Garnett took a look at the monitor and saw that he had to mimic a kid doing a rather funky little hopping dance, he asked if he was being Punk’d, Drain recalled laughing.
It is certainly easy to see why Garnett might be suspicious. Still, he went ahead and impressed everyone when he replicated the kids’ wild moves. “None of us thought he’d be able to do it,” Drain shared. “The kid was like rubber.”
Back at Asylum, Drain and the artists got down to the task of using the Inferno and Flame to composite the athletes’ heads onto the kids’ bodies. “The athletes’ necks were our biggest worry. You’ve got a guy like Peyton Manning whose neck is thicker than his head,” Drain explained. “How do you work that neck into the tiny neck of a 12-year-old?” The answer: The artists wound up making the necks of the kids’ supporting the heads of Manning and Wade a little wider than they normally would be.
Michael Heldman of Spot Welders, Venice, Calif., cut “Big Head,” and David Winer of stimmung, Santa Monica, composed the music track, which has an appropriately nostalgic Our Gang feel to it, according to Cronin.
As for reaction to the spot, Flannery reported that it has been positive, with “Big Head” appealing not only to its targeted tween audience but to teenagers and adults, too.
In the end, Drain credited much of the success of the spot to Ariola’s mastery of visual effects. “Some people go out and shoot willy-nilly, and then it is your problem. Well, Dante is not like that. He’s not like that at all,” Drain praised, adding, “He gets the process, and he understands that the visual effects work will help tell the story, and he’s willing to let go of something he’s madly in love with if he knows it’s not serving the project.”
