Movie Time
May 1, 2009 by Freakish Kid
Filed under Movie Time, The Art Of:
We were approached by Nick International to produce some animated packaging to ‘top and tail’ the latest movie trailers that air on the Nick International channels. The brief was a simple one – design, create and produce various visuals and gags to play at the beginning, end and through out the movie trailers that air on the networks. We were asked to create 3 simple characters that would be going to the cinema to watch the latest movies. As the viewer watching these 3 characters we would also see the latest movies that were hitting the cinema.
The original idea was to have the characters monsters of some kind, they had to be sweet and funny but also have something to do with sound and vision. Our creative design team got to work straight away and produced some original sketches that we felt depicted what Nickelodeon wanted. Bright coloured funny characters that were some how linked to sound and vision.
We went through different versions of the 3 characters and modified them with the team at Nick International. Whilst they all enjoyed the designs and were happy with what we sent it was agreed that something was missing from the idea.
It was decided to scrap the monster/sound and visual idea in favour of something more connected with the cinema. The new brief was stronger, no longer was it 3 friends going to check out what was on the local cinema. Now it was a star studied event, a red carpet premiere. The ‘it’ place to be to watch the latest blockbusters, the 3 characters that we designed all represented the cinema or the experience of the cinema in some way.
Our original designs had the ‘Hot Dog’ star (who we decided was the rapper Snoop ‘HOT’ Dog!) his agent (Agent Cup) and his very own security personnel (Mr. Chair) We pimped The Dog out in classy gear making sure he was slick and suave, his bun making up his beefy coat, we also gave him shades and an afro (because all hot dogs have one!!) His agent was a cup dressed in a classy suit, which would ‘spill’ his contents every time he got excited! And his bodyguard would just loom over everyone in the background – he was built like a huge wall!
Whilst we were originally happy with the designs it did become clear that the characters weren’t fun enough. Nickelodeon’s main problem, and one that we agreed with, was that they were not instantly recognizable as the object that they were designed from. And so we set about trying to make them more like the objects they were supposed to be.
Not much changed for Agent Cup, the biggest changes for this character were how we were going to animate him, he need to be very enthusiastic, he also needed to splash drink everywhere – we decided to make that drink orange juice so that the liquid resembled the colour of the Nickelodeon branding.
The main change in the design was to take away his legs, it was decided he could ‘splash’ more if he had to bounce everywhere! Also making him more energetic would give him a younger feel, something that was important to Nickelodeon. We originally designed him chugging a fat cigar and carrying a briefcase (obviously how we picture a typical agent!). Smoking (especially cups!) is not a good thing for kids to see and a briefcase is just too official! These were minor issues and didn’t really change the heart of the character.
Mr. Chair underwent a big change, as a bodyguard he was too much in the background and too aggressive, Nick wanted him up front and center with the other characters. Also as the ideas behind Hot Dog changed so did the idea of the character needing a bodyguard. So it was decided to make him more of an equal character to Hot Dog and have him more involved with the visual gags. So we went back to our sketch books and came up with the idea of making him more of an action hero, a leading man.
The main focus was to get the characters as light and fun as possible. He did wear a tux at first but the problem with phase one of our designs was that he really didn’t resemble a chair, he looked more like a fish in a suit! The simple route is almost always the most effective, we took a design for a flip seat cinema chair and worked the character ‘into’ it. We added the face on the back of the seat, the flip up chair acted as his strong jaw and the arm rest and legs were his arms and legs! After all the searching he came to life much more for being a chair than us trying to design a character that looked like a chair!
Hot Dog was the character that required the most change; it was also the one character that went through many different designs. Firstly it went from a he to a she – it seemed much better to make her a diva, the leading lady to Mr. Chair’s leading man. It was this one change that seemed to make the others fall into place, Her bun served as her wrap around and the mustard served perfectly as her hair, dress and jewelry (we wanted to make her a blond not a ketchup red head!) Originally the character had legs but once again that seemed to detract from the object she was designed around so the idea was to have her ‘slide’ where ever she went.
We gave her a little dog that would appear and disappear from her ‘bun’ wrap around depending on the chaos that was happening around her – there was something funny about giving a hot dog a real dog, what happens if the dog got hungry?!! In the end what worked best, as with the chair, was the simplest approach something that we found through out the production.
There was no script with this production just a list of top line ideas to which we would produce animatics. There would need to be an intro – a sequence that would involve them turning up at the event, posing for photo’s the sitting down to watch the show. There would also need to be an outro something to finish the spots off with. We came up with a simple idea of them leaving the cinema, Mr. Chair would walk ‘into’ the camera, as the film faded to black we revealed the Nickelodeon logo. The rest of the ideas were reaction shots and fillers to edit in between the actual movie trailer to give the illusion of our 3 characters watching the show.
Once our ideas were approved we moved onto storyboard and animatics, our original idea was to have the gags run about 5 seconds each but we soon found that some were running way too long. In the end we decided to not put a time limit on the gag, if it worked at 2 seconds that’s what it would be.
Once the animatics were approved we started work on the mood of the spots. We produced a few different colour sketches to give the client and ourselves the building blocks that we needed to feel comfortable with the work ahead. Once all of that was approved it was time to start the character build and animation.
From the start we wanted to do something a little different with animation, we decided not to produce a vector animation (which is what we normally do). We decided to produce some concept sketches made from different textures to see what worked. We wanted the characters to have an illustrated look about them.
Once we had chosen a textured style we liked we produced key pose sketches and then made final artwork from them – these would form the main key poses in the animation, we utilized a pose to pose concept, having the motion from key to key no more than a few frames, holding a strong pose as long as possible before moving onto the next. We were pretty sure that once we animated it the characters would have a depth and a quality look that couldn’t be achieved with flat colour.
There was some extra design work required for each of the spots, these were mainly secondary characters and background props. Although they were not as important to the gags as the main characters every attention to detail needed to be given to them just like our 3 heroes.
Many of these characters only required one model build as they didn’t need as much motion, some were static in the shots designed and built merely to make the scenes look busier. It should be noted that no piece of artwork is simply a throw away thing, as much time goes into every aspect of the design be it on screen for the duration or only a few frames. This attention to detail is what makes the work stand head and shoulders above the rest.
The backgrounds from the spots were very minimal, there were 2 locations outside the cinema and inside the auditorium, out of these 2 locations a few different angles were produced, we wanted to keep cutting within the spots down to a minimum as the running times of each gag we’re pretty short.
Once animation and the backgrounds were completed the focus of the production was shifted to the composite. Many discussions were had concerning the shot set ups and camera motion, one thing was clear, the raised seating in a cinema could hold a terrific amount of depth on screen, even by adding a small amount of camera motion you would be able to feel the depth within the scene.
Different camera styles were looked at including a handheld camera. This was something we were keen on doing, it gave the spots feeling of reality and added another layer to the overall animation. We did a camera test to show Nickelodeon what we had in mind. Ultimately they opted for a static camera, their reason being that they felt the camera operator had become a character and we never saw him/her which could be problematic with their audience, a valid point and one that we agreed with so we decided to make the camera less important and focus on the characters in the scene.
Nickelodeon International were very happy with the work that was produced for them, it was such a success that they instantly ordered several more gags to be produced which double the time duration and helped us create a few more characters. As an example of how the final spots worked on air we’ve top and tailed one of the big movies of 2009 ‘Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” All rights belong to their respective owners.
