Toronto animation company Red Rover and 3D animation shop Loop Media recently provided a letter-perfect way to push the traditional animation approach on ‘Toys,’ a new spot for Alpha-Bits, while staying in tune with the style of the cereal’s past spots.

The spot, created out of BBDO Toronto, combines Red Rover’s traditional cel animated main characters and Loop’s 3D characters and environments seamlessly integrated into the spot. It features two children and Alpha, the cereal’s mascot, interacting in a fantasy room of giant Alpha-Bits and toys.

Red Rover supplied designs and drawn layouts to Loop, which built backgrounds in wire frame. Objects were then painted as though they were flat objects and wrapped around the wire frames, so the painted surface is the rendered surface that appears in the final spot. For example, says Red Rover’s Andy Knight, the table in the room was painted as though it were an architectural drawing, with detail like wood grain included in and laid over the wire frame. Loop says the agency and two shops worked closely to ensure consistency in color palettes between cel and cg. Final cel rendering of characters was designed to work with cg light coming into the room through a window. ‘The 3D component in this spot gave us the ability to provide a lot of creative flexibility,’ says Loop’s Jeff Bastedo. ‘Because everything took place within a digital set, we had the best of both worlds. We established a beautiful traditional cel treatment as the foundation and were able to use the flexibility of the cg setting to easily change any aspect of the 3D characters or camera angles within each scene.’

The Artists: Knight directed the spot out of Red Rover, with that shop’s Jens Pindal also animating and Nikki Kefford producing. At Loop, Bastedo was cg art director and Bill Hutchinson was technical director. The spot was created out of bbdo by creative director Wally Krysciak and writer Rob Tait.

The Gear: Loop used Side Effects Houdini and Mantra renderer as well as Renderman from Pixar.