Hasta La Motion!

Here’a a nice little forced-perspective spot from Virgilio Villoresi and Neue Big. There’s many more in-camera tricks in his portfolio, including the photo heavy viral video for fashion label Dsquared2 and the Lou Rhodes’s “The Rain” music video, made with Erica il Cane. His work reminds me of Zbig Rybcynski, Virgil Widrich, and David Russo – a playful change of pace.

Posted on Motionographer

More whimsical fun from Sean Pecknold aka Grandchildren! This time it’s in-camera, in-sequence stop-motion from beginning to end for BBC Knowledge. If you like it, check out his previous spot too.

Some production photos and a bit about the process from Sean after the jump!

The spot has a very hands-on look, how much is in camera vs. post?
All of the spot is in-camera on a multi-plane table in sequence. The characters are either paper or clay. All of the backgrounds are painted. Even the natural elements, like clouds and stars, were a layer of animated paint shot in-camera. Because of the way the transitions worked from one thing to the next, we had to be careful because there wasn’t any time to start over, really. The only shot that isn’t fully in camera would be the mouse shot that we mirrored for the clone effect.

Any fun stories from production? Did you guys shoot an actual mouse?
During the animation, the studio was taken over by a couple rogue mice. It almost got us kicked out of the studio by the landlord. We tried to catch one of them for the mouse shot, but we couldn’t get our hands on the sneaky bugger. After that, we tried a few different animated mice. In the end what ended up working is walking down to the pet store and dropping two bucks on some mice.

We tried to shoot it on green-screen, but ended up building the shot around the mouse in his little plastic house. The thing about mice is they don’t like to stand still at all. Especially when you’ve got lights and cameras up in their business. We had to shoot for a couple hours to get the right moment. I hope the mice enjoyed their vacation from the pet store! I worry they may fall prey to snakes someday.

What was the brief or was it an open brief? How long was production?
The script was great. We tried out some techniques, and off to the races we went. The majority of the production took about three weeks once everything was approved.

Credits
Director: Sean Pecknold
Executive Producer: Aaron Ball
Producer: Brian Waldrop
Animators: Sean Pecknold, Britta Johnson
Paintings: Britta Johnson
Lighting Assist: Michael Ragen
Editorial and Color: Grandchildren
Art Assistant: Randy Bretzin
Sound Design and Mix: Justin Braegelmann

Agency: Three Drunk Monkeys, Australia
Exec. Creative Directors: Justin Drape, Scott Nowell
Creative Director: Noah Regan
Art Director: Matt Heck
Copywriter: Damian Fitzgerald
Agency Producers: Thea Carone, John Ruggiero
Group Content Director: Dan Beaumont
Account Director: Kristen Hardeman
Content Manager: Brad Firth

Posted on Motionographer

Two LED spots have been dropped off the back of another. The first one, for Samsung, from The Viral Factory (director James Rouse) in London can be seen below:

We grabbed this one a few weeks ago. Since then, it has racked up a decent 4.7 million hits on Youtube. For those who may have missed it, it follows approximately 300 sheep covered in LED lights, a cast of local shepherds and their sheepdogs. The film features sheep being herded into a series of ever more improbable shapes. “The Viral Factory will not be drawn on what was real and what has been achieved in post, but a YouTube debate is predicted.”

This next, more recent, Honda spot is brought to you by W+K Amsterdam and Erik Van Wyk of Bouffant in Capetown. In this spot, the headlights of Hondas become the matrix in which to create simple animations. Most importantly, this was all captured in-camera.

Aside from the creative merits of the Honda ‘Lights’ spot, I’d like to shift the focus to the accompanying making-of video. Unlike the purely viral-format of the Samsung spot, W+K extracted their viral from the TVC shoot. Not only do they get a ‘free’ spot from it all, but they humanize the brand and introduce people to the innovation that goes on under the hood of it’s spots. By keeping it all in-camera, a BTS becomes something interesting enough to watch. Ramp up the scale of the actual shoot and you can do the same to the ‘wow’ factor.

The increase in creating supplemental BTS films seems to have hit a spike during the massive success of the Bravia Color Campaign. The BTS for the ‘Balls’ spot from Fallon/Juan Cabral and Fugslig is one of the more memorable. In preparation for the roll out of ‘Paint,’ Sony’s micro-site hosted a BTS with a countdown to the commercial’s premiere. And who could forget ‘Bunnies‘ and the making-of?

The price of a potential viral hype machine and a chance to show off your in-camera craftiness may not be more than a hand-held second unit. As ad dollars drop, web-content distribution grows and consumers become more savvy (and critical) of advertising, this practice seems like a multi-pronged solution to a few of the ad worlds evolving needs.

Posted on Motionographer