For the final installment of the Honeycomb campaign featuring the crazed Craver, Toronto’s TOPIX/Mad Dog faced the challenge of making the live-action stars of the spots seamlessly become that manic, furry embodiment of a young person’s yearning for the sweet cereal.

T/MD was originally awarded the project out of Grey New York, due in part to the shop’s proprietary solution for delivering realistic fur. The company has since created a cloth plug-in, TOPIX Cloth, which has been distributed internationally. For this project, which involved a morph of live action and CG characters, a customized motion-blur render was also created.

Facilitating the kid-to-Craver transition began on set, says T/MD director of animation Livio Passera. Shots and camera angles were selected with an eye to the transitions to be created later, with the Craver appearing through a series of morphs and blending and stretching.

T/MD dubbed the process a ‘snap morph,’ an articulated yet quick morph emphasizing the character rather than the change process.

Motion blur added to the realism, but also increased the rendering times involved with a complex fur character. Hence the custom plug-in, which Passera says proved faster and better than anything currently available off the shelf.

Gear: T/MD used Softimage to animate and Flint and Inferno for compositing (all on SGI) in addition to its own plug-in.

Artists: Doug Jines from NewYork-based Doug Jines Editorial directed the live action. At T/MD, Passera directed animation and Weinrib exec produced, with Sean Montgomery, Richard Rosenman and Andrea Leo as character animators, Marco Polsinelli as Flint/Inferno Artist and Colin Withers as technical director. The spot was created out of Grey New York, with VP/associate creative/art director Ken Barre and VP/producer Richard Tucker on the job.