Since 2005, Pedigree has encouraged people to adopt shelter dogs with tug-at-your-heartstrings advertising. Given the success of the campaign both in terms of promoting pet adoption and selling Pedigree dog food, this year Pedigree and its advertising agency, TBWAChiatDay, Los Angeles, decided to bring the message to a larger audience via Super Bowl XLIII.
The Super Bowl is, of course, a festive event, so the creative team knew it had to veer away from the aforementioned tug-at-your-heartstrings approach. So forget sad little puppy dogs sitting in cages. “You can’t ruin somebody’s Super Bowl party,” TBWAChiatDay creative director Chris Adams pointed out. “So we tried to come up with an entertaining and engaging approach.”
That led the creative team to ask: What would the world be like without dogs? What would life be like if we chose other animals as pets?
We find out in the :30 “Crazy Pets.” Directed by Traktor, which is represented by Partizan, with visual effects produced by the L.A. office of The Moving Picture Company (MPC), the spot finds a woman calling her rhino to go out for a walk only to have him crash through the door without his leash on.
Elsewhere, an elderly woman runs after her ostrich, chastising him for chasing the mailman away; a grandmother and grandchild are crammed into the back seat of a car with the family’s pet boar; and a guy tries–unsuccessfully–to play Frisbee with his bison.
“Maybe you should get a dog,” the Danny Duchovny voiceover intones for Pedigree’s adoption drive. “Help us help dogs.”
What a zoo
While a rhino, ostrich, boar and bison appear in “Crazy Pets,” there were other animals that were considered but ultimately didn’t make the cut, including a python, an alligator and a hippo. “Hippos are actually the most dangerous animals on the planet. They kill more people than any other animal,” Adams shared.
Beyond the danger factor, procuring a hippo just wasn’t practical. “The only hippo we could get was in Georgia,” Adams said, “and it was going to require shipping him across the United States.”
All of the animals you do see in the spot are real, by the way. Early on in the process, Traktor and the agency decided they didn’t want to rely on CG animals. “We wanted to get as much of it in-camera as we could–shooting plates for some of it if the animals were too dangerous–because we didn’t want it to be like Jumanji,” Adams shared. “We wanted it to look as real as possible.”
In planning how to shoot each animal, the production and VFX teams considered how dangerous each animal was and how best to keep them under control, according to MPC’s post producer Andrew Bell, who noted that the ostrich could be shot in the actual environment with the actors–that said, a yellow cord was wrapped around the location to ensure the ostrich didn’t take off, and a leather strap was attached to the ostrich just in case the trainer needed to grab him.
The bison was also pretty mellow and didn’t even get angry when a Frisbee was tossed at him, but much more care had to be taken when shooting the rhino and the boar. The rhino couldn’t be trusted to charge through a room without causing harm to humans, so that sequence was shot in three plates, Bell explained, with one plate of the rhino running through the set; one plate of the woman getting out of the rhino’s way; and one plate of a guy in a blue suit pushing a rig through the set, smashing furniture and bursting through the door. Later, the MPC artisans composited the plates, adding dust, debris and some wobble to a bookshelf and lamp.
The action in the boar scene was also comprised of three plates. That sequence was particularly challenging in that MPC needed to make sure that the boar’s fur was compressed where he was pressed up against the grandmother. On set, a blue rod was pressed against the boar’s fur so that the artisans had that visual to work with.
As much as the shots were planned, there were issues that came up during the post process, Bell said, noting that a head composite was performed on the grandmother, combining a great take of her body reacting to being jammed up against the boar with a different take that had her delivering the dialogue much better.
Additional credit for “Crazy Pets” goes to editor Dan Oberle of The Whitehouse, and composer Michael Fitz of Los Angeles-based New Math.
The wild, wild web While Traktor shot “Crazy Pets,” the agency brought in a video crew to shoot footage for additional spots that explain how each person came to own their pet and can be seen on Pedigree.com. The agency creatives gave each actor basic storyline points to hit but allowed them to ad lib, according to Adams, who praised Traktor with being open to the talent dividing their time on set between “Crazy Pets” and the web material. “Some directors might say, ‘No, it’s a distraction. I want them focused on what we’re doing,’ ” Adams said, “but Traktor was open to it and thought it was a good way for them to fill their downtime.”
