A baby runs amok through a party full of adults. Yet paradoxically his fast-paced reckless abandon is depicted via freeze frames in a commercial entitled “Soirée” for Huggies. The still images create a sense of frenetic motion that captures the elusiveness of the baby whose dad is in hot pursuit but to no avail.
Meanwhile in another spot we open on a fresh-faced Steve Nash back in Victoria, British Columbia, in 1996, prior to his being drafted by the Phoenix Suns and becoming the basketball superstar he is today. This archival footage shows Nash wearing a Santa Clara University jersey as he practices on a hardwood court at a gym. All the while, we see a modern-day element inserted into this footage and interacting with the young Nash–that contemporary element is a youngster who purports to be from the future.
The time-traveler begins, “You’re going to be a two-time MVP, seven-time all star, and you break your nose, like, a dozen times.” Incredulous, Nash smiles and drives toward the hoop and makes a lay-up.
The boy from the future continues, “Come on, Steve. Okay, okay. How ’bout this: ten years from now, you’ll visit my school and it’ll help turn my life around.”
Not buying it, Nash steals the ball from the boy who says, “Still don’t think I’m from the future, huh?” Nash sinks a three-point shot, prompting the boy to declare, “They’re gonna love that shot in Phoenix,” and the scene cuts to the NBA logo and tag, “Where amazing happens.”
These two spots are distinctly different wild rides which top this quarter’s SHOOT Visual Effects and Animation Chart. MassMarket, New York, was the visual effects house on the number one entry “Soirée” while right behind it was NBA’s “Nash” for which a52, Santa Monica, was the effects studio.
Chris Sargent of Park Pictures directed and shot the NBA Entertainment :30 for Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco. In a nutshell, a52 was tasked with designing a visual effects pipeline that would enable Sargent and the Goodby ensemble to get a genuine performance from the “future kid” and not have the youngster hindered by static cameras and by having to hit marks. Working with Sargent and editors Matt Murphy and Michael Wadsworth of Final Cut, the a52 coterie of talent–headed by VFX supervisor Pat Murphy–choreographed a sequence of actions that could be split into different shots so that the focus wasn’t on getting one complete performance, but rather a series of shots that when cut together told the story Sargent and Goodby envisioned. Prior to shooting, a52 cleaned the archival footage to remove Nash’s high school coach and create a clean plate that the future kid could be composited into. After the edit was refined, tracking and lighting played a big role in the overall composite. There were nuances in the archival footage that a52 had to replicate in order to make the composite feel believable.
Now here’s a more detailed backstory on the number one entry for Huggies:
“Soirée”
Directed by Fredrik Bond of MJZ and featuring the VFX work of MassMarket, the Huggies’ :30 “Soirée” for JWT New York centers on a baby who wreaks havoc at an upscale loft party.
The spot was designed to promote Huggies Little Movers diapers, which are shaped to fit in a way that allows babies to move faster and more freely. That insight led the creative team at JWT to wonder, could Huggies have created a diaper that has babies moving so fast they can’t be caught? From that question came the idea of producing a spot that finds a baby in overdrive. But rather than have the baby whizzing around at full tilt speed, which would seem like an obvious route to take, the creative team, including copywriter Daniel Gonzalez and art director David Suarez, created a sense of speed through a series of frozen vignettes. While the baby is a whirlwind of destruction, whipping around the party and knocking over everything from a plate of spaghetti to an aquarium with his dad in hot pursuit, the action is depicted in a series of intricate still moments.
At the outset of the project, senior integrated producer Owen Katz was confident his creative colleagues at JWT had conceptualized a brilliant spot, but he confessed he wasn’t sure Bond would even look at the brief given that it was for a diaper commercial.
Bond did look at it and was impressed by the possibilities and challenges offered by the concept. The director not only executed what he read on paper, but he “took it the next mile. He added value. He pushed the boundaries. He pushed the budget,” Katz said with a laugh. “He made the spot better, and you don’t always get that when you hire a director.”
Given the complexity of what JWT and Bond wanted to pull off, MassMarket executive producer Justin Lane felt it was important to get everyone involved in the project in one room together to plot out a course of action. Going low-tech, Lego toys were spread out on a conference table, serving as representations of the people in the spot, and a camera phone was flown through the setup to show how the camera would move within the environment. MassMarket used the resulting video to create an animated pre-vis.
Just over a week later, Bond and DP Hoyte van Hoytema shot “Soirée” on location at a Manhattan loft. “We shot all of it for real,” Bond said.
Each vignette was arranged and lit, and shot individually, a motion control camera snaking through the scene. For the most part, the actors, which included Rod Luzzi as the dad and Bond’s friend Emil Moller, whom he described as an amazing pantomime, had to make an expression and hold it. Some were standing, while others hung from the air on wires. (A mannequin stood in for the baby.) But Bond didn’t require total stillness. “If you look closely, they are all moving slightly,” Bond shared, explaining that the movement–you’ll see one girl’s eyes darting toward the end of “Soirée”–gave the spot life.
As far as postproduction, MassMarket touched every frame of the spot, rotoscoping the individual vignettes and marrying them together; adding 3D elements, including the cake and cake bits we see hanging in the air and the water in the fish tank; completely removing the ceiling of the loft and replacing it with a 3D ceiling; and speeding up or slowing down certain segments. Massive amounts of rig and wire removal were also performed.
When it came to marrying the vignettes, “Something that worked to our advantage was the spot was shot on RED,” sr. Flame artist Jamie Scott said. “Shooting digitally meant the motion control shots lined up a lot better than if it had been shot on film.”
The biggest challenge was the 3D head replacement on the baby, according to lead Flame artist David Parker. Katz credited MassMarket with developing a camera rig that–as unobtrusively as possible–swung around a real baby and captured numerous facial expressions from varying angles. MassMarket’s 3D department then used those stills to create CGI baby heads.
