The headless horseman is a scary character. But the horseless headsman, well, he’s not frightening at all as we see in a new Halloween-themed spot for Snickers created by BBDO New York and directed by Craig Gillespie of bicoastal/international MJZ. The crew at bicoastal/international Framestore did the effects.
In the :45 version of “Horseless Headsman” made for the web, the horseless headsman is basically a giant head. He doesn’t even have a horse. He is just tottering around in the dark on his tiny legs, bumping into cars and trying–but failing–to scare a group of kids out on Halloween trick or treating.
It turns out he is hungry, and after eating a Snickers, the horseless headsman becomes himself again, turning back into the headless horseman and scaring the bejesus out of the trick or treaters.
Explaining the thinking behind the commercial, BBDO associate creative director/copywriter Alex Taylor told SHOOT, “Snickers’ ‘You’re not you when you’re hungry’ campaign is based on the simple insight that you’re not yourself when you’re hungry–you become weak, mean or cranky, and we’ve seen those traits represented in previous Snickers ads featuring Betty White, Joe Pesci, Roseanne Barr and others. When it came time for us to do a Halloween spot, our minds naturally went to classic Halloween characters–what would happen if they were hungry?”
After some pondering, the decision was made to base a commercial on a headless horseman who had somehow devolved into the horseless headsman.
“We spent a lot of time discussing what the horseless headsman would look like,” said BBDO associate creative director/art director Jason Stefanik. “Would he just be a head rolling around? A normal man with a giant head? Or a man with a head for a body? It was a really fun problem to figure out.”
Comedic effect It was decided that the character would appear as a giant head with tiny arms and legs, so Legacy Effects, based in San Fernando, Calif., built a four-foot tall head adorned with flowing white locks.
Actor Dana Woods wore the head during the shoot, and puppeteers from Legacy Effects operated tiny arms and legs that had been attached to the head.
“We were talking about whether we would do CG arms and legs, then Legacy did a test for us, and there was an awkwardness to the puppeteering, something not so fluid about it that made it funny, so we decided we’d go that way and do the rig removal,” director Gillespie explained.
Actor Ezra Buzzington was the face of Horseless Headsman, cast for his ability to be expressive and animated, according to Gillespie. His face was later inserted onto the giant head by the artisans at Framestore.
“This approach was really about comedy as opposed to technical requirements,” commented Framestore VFX creative director Murray Butler. “We had initially suggested using a small person inside a big head on location, and the director pushed it a stage further by adding much smaller puppeteered arms and legs. This pushed the character into a surreal realm as clearly his little legs would never support his giant head. We were worried about this looking unreal in the comp, but in the end it was much funnier. Using a real shot face on top of this meant Craig could get the performance he wanted.”
Challenges Gillespie and cinematographer Gyula Pados shot “Horseless Headsman” on location in Los Angeles at night. The director said his biggest challenge was the limited amount of time he had with his cast of child actors–the shoot began at 9 p.m., and the kids were only allowed to work for three hours.
Once the child actors departed, the shoot carried on until 5 a.m.
“Another challenge we discovered that night was that when you put a bunch of lights up in the trees, the local birds think it’s daytime and start chirping, which really messes with the audio,” Taylor remarked.
Jason MacDonald of bicoastal No6 cut the footage from the “Horseless Headsman” shoot into three spots–the :45 for the web and :30 and :15 commercials for television.
“We had a pretty tight story, but there were a lot of funny moments we wanted to squeeze in,” Taylor related, noting that MacDonald did an excellent job making it all fit, using the overarching Snickers campaign as a guiding narrative.
Framestore spent about three weeks working on the effects. There was a lot of fine compositing and tracking work done to seamlessly blend the face of Buzzington with the puppet head. “They did a good job of putting it together and tying [Buzzington’s] face movements to the head movements–that was the tricky part,” Gillespie praised.
Framestore’s artisans also had to reanimate the arms and legs of the horseless headsman in certain shots. “In the opening shot, the arms didn’t move at all, so we added CGI ones,” Butler shared.
There was also work to be done on the fog. “The levels tended to vary through the original cut,” Butler said, “so we had a lot of background work to do to balance it all out. We also added some very cool moving fog that swallows up the Headless Horseman at the end.”
