Str-e-e-e-tching budgets

Take a few thousand pebbles of hardened cornstarch, add some vacuum suction and ta da! you’ve got Vac Man, Cap Toys’ latest kid-thrilling gismo. Throw $100,000 into the mix and you’ve got yourself another made-in-Canada toy commercial guaranteed to keep toy company execs thrilled to bits.

‘Vac Man’ is the latest in a long stream of u.s. toy commercials produced in Vancouver over the last couple of years. These imports have been a welcome boon to the local commercial production community which has labored under frequent dry spells.

Apple Box Productions executive producer Greg Bosworth says Vac Man is the newly created arch enemy of Cap’s previous big seller, Stretch Armstrong.

West Coast-based director Graham Hunt, repped in Vancouver by Apple Box, directed the Stretch Armstrong commercial a few years ago. For ‘Vac Man,’ he took a cartoonish approach to both the set design and direction, imbuing the commercial with a look that’s a cross between Batman and Dick Tracy. Primary colors dominate and the action is bold and exaggerated.

According to Bosworth, Cleveland, Ohio-based Cap couldn’t have produced this quality of commercial in the States on the shoestring budget attached. But with Canada’s low dollar and high-caliber of animation, set design and construction, Apple Box was able to pull it off in grand fashion.

One of the greatest challenges in creating this commercial, says Bosworth, was delivering the quality animation and prosthetic devices needed within the client’s low-budget specifications. ‘It should have been done for a quarter of a million dollars, but we had less than one hundred thousand.

‘Our next challenge,’ he says, ‘was matching a computer-generated version of the Vac Man character to an actor in a suit with a prosthetic head. So first we had to see how good the computer-generated version could be, and then we matched it to our prosthetic head. We then had to composite the Vac Man character into a scene to make it look believable and real.

‘The final challenge was making Vac Man move through an exploding door at the end of the commercial.’ This was achieved through a combination of effects work at Vancouver’s Northwest Imaging and FX and additional post-production, done later in Detroit.

‘I think there’s a nice blend in this spot with the sets complementing the computer animation and vice versa,’ says Bosworth. ‘Whenever you are compositing a computer element into a live plate you always run the risk of having it not work, but I think here it does.’

The 30-second spot begins with the sound of a bank siren. A voice in the background yells for help. Stretch Armstrong appears from across the street, extending his long arm to grab ahold of the getaway car’s bumper and shouting, ‘Stop! Stop, evil-doers!’

The camera then pulls back to reveal that Stretch’s actions are being monitored by his nemesis Vac Man in the Vac Cave. Vac Man, vowing to destroy our hero Stretch, hooks his Vac-pump into his headset device to begin his transformation process.

The camera moves in for a close-up as Vac Man begins to inflate. Cut to children playing with Vac Man using the Vac-pump to deflate and stretch him.

In a climatic finale, the camera cuts back to the Vac Cave to show our transformed 18-foot monster crash through a six-foot doorway amidst smoke, steam and flames in hot pursuit of Stretch. The voice-over then asks, ‘Will this be the last of Stretch Armstrong? Only you can decide.’

Then the sign-off: ‘To be continued…’

Credit goes Patti Grech who produced for Apple Box, to Peter Salmon and Michael Caluori who created the superb prosthetics on a thimble budget, and to Brian Moyland of Northwest who did the precision computer animation. Roger Vernon handled the camera, Vic Harnett of Northwest called the cuts for the edit and compositing. Color correction was by Gary Shaw at Post Haste and special effects were by Jim Fisher, with audio handled back in Detroit. Special kudos go to Vac Man actor Dale Moore who was suited up in a modified diver’s wet suit for more than eight hours without the pleasure of a bathroom.

Vac Man begins airing across the u.s. and in Canada later this spring. JM

Down and dirty

just when everyone’s bragging about how crisp and clean an image can be, that component digital stuff, you know, along comes Toronto’s Spin Productions actually admitting it’s been responsible for the D-word.

Hesitate to actually put that word (‘dirty’) on paper. Instead, a quote from the perpetrator: ‘Tasteful 1950s live-action stock footage is combined with film grained, motion blurred, dirtied up and scratched computer graphics, courtesy of Spin Productions.’

Yes, Spin’s Norm Stangl says, they meant to do it. The project involved a pool of five spots, including 60-, 30- and 15-second lengths, for Bozell North (Southfield, Mich.) and its u.s. government client.

The Spin spin in the commercial involved putting the aforementioned stock footage together with an image of the client’s Consumer Information Catalog and to make these catalogs figure prominently in the commercials. Part of that objective could be met by combining the black-and-white stock footage with images of these live-action catalogs, which feature a white cover with blue lettering above a red star/flag logo. The color image of the catalog naturally stands out against the b&w film.

But then Spin had to figure out how to make it look as if the people already in the stock footage intended to be holding onto these books. The other option was to make the combination look so obviously unlikely as to be absurd. The resulting spots feature a little of the former objective and a little of the latter. Some of the people do look as if they’re happy to be holding some type of book, but this catalog, well that’s stretching it. Especially the shot of the fisherman holding the book the way he’d hold a large mouth bass. The book even bends like one.

Summing it up, Spin’s senior animator, John Coldrick, says, ‘The mandate was to create a computer-generated catalog that integrated with a quirky style to the select archival live-action footage.’

Stangl says Spin’s ‘creative understanding’ of the process helped it accomplish its mission on the project. To say nothing of the 3D animation software, Prisms from Side Effects Software and Matador from Parallax, which facilitated paint, compositing and image processing. Spin took the spots to the digital suite for final compositing courtesy the Quantel Henry and the creative input of Henry master Steven Lewis.

Lisa Weinrib produced for Spin, with Rob Jones as art director. Agency credits go to producer Sarah Fazio, art director Lynn Simoncini and writer Maureen Donnellon. ST