In this Gatorade Recover campaign from agency VML, Bent Image Lab turns out “stop motion” sporting figures literally created from the brand–with each character fashioned from Gatorade Whey Protein bottles and wrappers. The challenge for Bent’s director Rob Shaw was creating the origami/paper-craft style characters so that they feel powerful and epic but not cartoon-like. To achieve this, Bent’s animators studied real players and matched their animation to the athletes’ actual performances. The juxtaposition of human movements performed by hand-crafted characters is a unique take on stop motion.
“It was a sort of stop-mo motion capture,” said Bent Image’s Rob Shaw who directed the campaign. “The big difference between our process and CG motion capture is that in stop motion, the animation is a straight ahead performance. The animator had to analyze the footage, combining different aspects from different reference clips, and then combine everything in a way that works.”
Each of the four :15s depicted a different sport: basketball, baseball, hockey and football. In the spot titled “Basketball,” a wrapper from a Gatorade Whey Protein bar comes to life and goes strong to the hoop.
Client Gatorade Agency VML Matthew Bowne, group creative director; Amanda Laffoon, art director; David Kobzantsev, producer. Production Bent Image Lab Rob Shaw, director; Ray Di Carlo, exec producer; Robert D’Esposito, producer; Brianna Vitale, production coordinator. Russ Eaton, DP; Wendy Fuller, Bartek Prusiewicz, Jerold Howard, animators; Orland Nutt, compositor; Dan Kim, additional compositor; Brent Heise, editor; Lance Limbocker, SFX and audio.
Director Gia Coppola Teams With Mejuri For “A New York Minute”; 1st Episode Takes Us To The Grocery Store
Mejuri, known for turning fine jewelry into an everyday luxury, has partnered with director Gia Coppola (The Last Show Girl, Palo Alto) and The Directors Bureau in Los Angeles, for the first time reimagining the brand’s story as episodic content. In a series of microfilms, co-created by Coppola and premiering following New York Fashion Week, Mejuri eschewed a typical celebrity campaign and cast us as voyeurs to a group of aspiring young women--real people, not actors--at the crossroads of their adult lives against the backdrop of New York City.
Titled “A New York Minute,” the series features five real-life friends, who include one perfectly imperfect heroine named Emma. The women celebrate ordinary moments and interactions which reveal, sometimes retrospectively, the extraordinary within the mundane. Adjacent to the brand’s own community, the 30-something year old cast includes Laura Love (Emma), Rebecca Ressler, Natalie Vall-Freed and Rozzi Crane. Mejuri’s jewelry makes an appearance as the best supporting actor.
“When I met with Gia and The Directors Bureau team, there was instant creative and personal chemistry and a natural alignment on the desire to push and blur the lines between marketing, storytelling, and the construct of what a ‘campaign’ could be,” said Jacob Jordan, chief brand officer, Mejuri. “Gia was able to push that idea into something that truly feels new and artful, with a realism and relatability that almost feels jarring. Gia was such a perfect collaborator and partner, someone I had complete trust in to be a catalyst for Mejuri’s values of celebrating women as their truest selves. I can’t wait for us to continue to tell the next chapters of this story.”
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