Ah, cute little kittens. Who doesn’t love kittens, not to mention commercials featuring kittens?
“Ninja Kittens,” a :45 Australian spot for Toyota full of kittens, has gotten all sorts of international attention. Kanye West even posted a link to the commercial on his blog, and Kanye knows cool.
Created by Sydney’s Publicis Mojo and directed by Garth Davis of Melbourne’s Exit Films, with visual effects by Sydney’s Animal Logic, “Ninja Kittens” is set in a world where kittens have kitten heads attached to human bodies.
Oh, and they also drive cars.
As “Ninja Kittens” opens, the fearless hero kitten of the spot invades what is clearly the lair of a group of bad guy kittens, and he gets into a fight with the felines, stealing their sardine stash before escaping in their Toyota Corolla.
The action is accompanied by an intense Bot’Ox track titled “The Crash Theme.” (Karl Richter of Melbourne’s Level Two Music served as music supervisor on the spot.)
“Ninja Kittens” ends with the tagline “Packed with a lil’ action.”
“The brief was really about a car that was full of features that made it fun to drive–from a zippy engine to a push-button ignition to an MP3 player and so on, and it’s a compact car. So once we had the line ‘Packed with a lil’ action,’ we just needed to find a story that could be action-filled and yet small in some way. That’s where the kittens came in,” Publicis Mojo creative director Micah Walker explained.
Davis, who happens to have two cats of his own, said he was drawn to the idea because it was “mad, unclassic and free.”
That said, Davis wasn’t sold on ninja-fighting kittens. “I was very keen to move the script away from ninja and try and own the world we were in,” Davis said.
So that meant coming up with a more original style of kitten fighting that incorporated everything from kung fu to Capoeira to parkour. (As you’ll notice, the name of the spot was never changed to reflect the absence of ninja fighting. “The title just stayed clinging,” Walker mused.)
Paws pause “In terms of fighting, I studied how kittens play and fight and tried to bring this into fighting styles we all know about. So pauses, distractions and movements were key in the choreography, and then the location also inspired how they moved and fought,” Davis shared.
The director set the spot in what was once a nightclub in an abandoned shopping mall. But before Davis shot a single frame, he consulted with Animal Logic. “When Garth first approached us, he was very keen to keep this film looking real. He didn’t want it to be an FX-driven ad or for the kitten heads to dominate the action, and he wanted to push the limits of anything that had been done before in head replacement without technical restrictions,” Animal Logic VFX supervisor and lead compositor Colin Renshaw said, noting, “I know he loved it when we said, ‘Shoot it however you want, and we will work it out later.’ “
The production schedule was divided into two stages, with the first being the live action shoot for the human action sequences. Davis and DP Robert Humphreys shot the main fighting sequence in the aforementioned shopping mall. The performers were wearing specially-built helmets equipped with tracking balls, and Animal Logic VFX supervisor Colin Renshaw and CG lead Jonathan Dearing were on set creating the roadmap they would need for the second phase of production.
After editor Jo Scott of Melbourne’s Digital Pictures cut the spot, Animal Logic moved into phase two, a visual effects studio shoot involving real, live kittens whose heads were later matched to the live action shot by Davis. Animal Logic used the same lens to shoot the kitten heads that was used to shoot the live action to minimize lens distortion and shot the kitten heads at 50fps at a 90-degree angle to minimize motion blur.
“While we had intended to play the kitten head action at normal speed, we found that playing them at half speed helped take a lot of their crazy jitter out of the movement and made them feel a little less nervous,” explained Animal Logic’s Renshaw.
Because of the sheer volume of complex tracks and angle matching that was involved in the process of selecting takes of the kitten heads, Renshaw was given creative freedom to “shortlist” the cat heads that worked best to tell the story. It was a rather painstaking process. “We might have three or four good takes for one action, each with subtle differences in performance, and because of the complexity of shots, really the only way you could see it was to bash comp it in Flame,” Renshaw said. “So for every finished comp, there were probably three other comps that didn’t make the cut.”
Ultimately, the commercial contains less fighting than was originally scripted. “There are some brilliant sequences we just couldn’t use or finish, which always breaks your heart,” Walker said.
Light moment Still, there are some amazing sequences that did make the cut.
One of the most clever and funny sequences finds the hero kitten hitting a light fixture above the sardine bar with a pool cue. It sways back and forth, and the three bad kittens behind the bar are distracted, unable to resist their desire to watch it move and giving the hero kitten an opportunity to steal their fish.
“That was in the script, and that, for me, was what inspired everything as it was so kitten,” Davis said. “It also makes [the spot] more than just an animal head on someone, which we have seen so many times before.”
