Wednesday, January 07, 2009

Some of My OLD OLD Commercials

I was on YouTube and I found some old commercials I did many years ago and thought I would try to see if I could post them.

The first one was the first commercial I ever did called "Making Breakfast Fun". It was all done about 19-years ago on film and optically composited like in Roger Rabbit. One short scene that was just over a second long ended having nearly 400 frames of mattes and elements created to composite the animation into the live action. It was tones of work, but it was so much fun. It was also the first time I was able to work with one of Nelvana Ltd's former owners, Clive Smith. He was in charge of Nelvana's Bear Spots that did commercials, specials and festival films. I started in Bear Spots in 1989 and had the great pleasure of working for Clive for the next 7-years.



The "Milk Mob" commercial was also great fun not only because of the live action/animation mix, but because we also did some stop motion car animation. It was a bit different because the animation had to be shot in matte sync because it was being transferred to video for compositing in an on-line suite.

I still have the cars that I built from metal kits. Their painting took forever because we couldn't get a nice candy apple red. I painted and stripped the cars at least seven times before I was able to get it right with an undercoat of a shiny silver paint covered with a nice red that I think was a Chrysler car colour. We had two scales for the cars to work within the differents sets. The sets themselves were basically flat pieces of painted artwork mounted on foamcore boards. Everything was taken to a studio that had a motion control camera and we had a professional live action lighting guy set up the lights and gels on the sets. We had space for two sets and as each shot was done we would go to the next set to do what was needed while the old one was being taken down and replaced. The only disappointment was the last minute voice change by the client. They thought that the Mobster saying "We got company" was too scary. The voice they substituted makes the animation look wrong because he sounds goofy instead of threatening. Oh, well ... that's water under the bridge from about 16-years ago. Enjoy.