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.
 

Credits

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.

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