Shortly after its debut, “98% Human,” a PSA for PETA out of BBDO New York, scored on the global stage, winning for Mill+ and The Mill a Film Craft Gold Lion for Best Visual Effects at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. Now add another feather to that spot’s proverbial cap–the number one slot in SHOOT’s quarterly Top Ten VFX/Animation Chart.
The latter is an honor earned as much for what’s in the spot as what isn’t. Narrated by Adrien Brody, “98% Human” introduces us to a great ape who’s alone in a room. Brody makes us aware of how apes’ lives take a significant turn for the worse when they are forced to perform in TV and motion pictures. Stolen from their mothers at birth, beaten and abused behind the scenes, apes most likely will end up discarded at a roadside zoo, held in captivity for decades until their death.
“Could you live this life?” asks Brody.
The ape in the PSA then sits at a table and picks up a gun which he places under his chin. Before he can pull the trigger, the screen goes black. We then see the PETA logo, the email address GreatApePledge.org (where producers and creatives can pledge not to use apes in entertainment content) and the line, “No real apes were used in this commercial.”
The latter is a stunning revelation because the chimp in the spot looks and feels real. Yet he is the creation of Mill+, the design and animation studio of New York’s The Mill. “The second I read the board, I thought, ‘Wow, this could be really powerful,’ ” said Mill+ animation director Angus Kneale, who also holds the title of creative director at The Mill.
BBDO’s script called for a computer-generated chimpanzee to be created that would appear completely authentic–the success of the spot relying entirely on the viewer believing the chimp was real. If a creature that fooled viewers couldn’t be created, the message would be lost. BBDO and PETA wanted a key part of that message to be that CG animals could be created, precluding the need to use real animals in moving imagery.
From day one, Mill+ and The Mill knew they had to raise the bar and come up with the best CG animated chimp ever created.
But why not go with the tried-and-true method of motion capture instead, outfitting an actor in one of those specialized suits and tracking his movements? “The technology in those suits actually gets in the way of the storytelling. It gets in the way of capturing the emotions,” maintained BBDO NY executive creative director Toygar Bazarkaya, adding, “We did not want to capture the motion. We wanted to capture the emotion.”
So Kneale shot actor Ryan Garbayo in regular clothes, focusing on his emotional performance rather than suiting him up simply to obtain data for animators. “We weren’t treating the shoot like we were going to be doing everything 3D,” Kneale said. “We treated it with the care and detail and level of respect that a normal production would have gotten.”
Garbayo’s performance was recorded during a one-day shoot which took place in a cold, stark operating room at an abandoned hospital in Passaic, New Jersey. Maryse Alberti, whose film credits include director Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler and Alex Gibney’s Oscar-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side, served as DP.
“We used the actor as a template for composition, timing, lighting, emotional reference, and we cut together a spot purely based on his performance,” Kneale said. (Max Koepke of New York’s Lost Planet was the editor.) “We went through many, many different iterations, cutting a live-action pre-vis for our chimpanzee.”
Using clean background plates and Alberti’s camera moves, the animators then reconstructed each shot in the pre-vis and created an animated chimp whose emotional performance was inspired by that of the actor.
Layered approach The animal was built layer upon layer, starting with the skeleton. “We knew that we were going to use a lot of close-ups, and we knew that they were going to be very well lit, and there was going to be nowhere to hide in terms of detail. So we started realizing that the only way to get true movement was to go and build the whole underlying structure underneath the chimp’s fur,” Kneale explained.
Creating a skeleton, a muscle system, skin and then fur was a complex process. “We could have built a model and put fur on it and animated it, and it would have looked okay,” Kneale acknowledged. “But we would have hit a limit with realism, and we just didn’t want to hit that limit.”
The most challenging part of constructing the CGI chimp was getting his eyes right. “About a month before delivery, we were in this terrible place where it didn’t work. It didn’t look good. It didn’t feel right. It felt like an animatronic puppet. It just didn’t have any life in it,” Kneale recalled, noting that the eyes were to blame.
The visual effects team re-worked the chimp’s eyes until everyone was convinced that they were looking into the eyes of a living creature. “At the end, it was a lot of finessing,” Bazarkaya said. “The last five percent was probably the hardest and most time consuming.”
The attention to detail paid off. “People are blown away when they realize it’s completely digital,” Kneale said of “98% Human,” pointing out that even the gun seen in the spot is CGI.
Pledge Back in 2011, BBDO agreed to take PETA’s “The Great Ape Pledge,” promising to no longer use monkeys, apes, baboons or chimps in films and commercials.
To further the effort at that time, BBDO New York launched an initiative to help educate advertisers and agencies about the harm done to monkeys, apes, baboons and chimps when used in films. For starters, BBDO installed an auto correct program on all its computers. Whenever words such as “monkey” or “ape” or “chimpanzee” are typed, the rest of a sentence appears automatically: “…who was taken from his mother when only weeks old to act in front of the camera. During his training, the ape will be kicked, punched, and beaten to perform what you are just about to write.”
