Spinning shoes and roaming clothes set against bright, busy backgrounds give an old department store a funky new look for fall.

Eaton’s latest spots, ‘Lucky You’ and ‘Closet,’ through Roche Macaulay & Partners and helmed by The Partners’ Film Company’s director Floria Sigismondi, are the latest glimpse at the department store’s hip new image and feature an eyeful of advertising that focuses on the modern woman from head to toe.

‘Lucky You’ spells out the many shoes a woman has to fill as a lover, daughter, teacher, sister, etc., words which appear on flipping street signs as new fall shoes spin wildly to techno tunes as fresh faces appear center screen and colored clouds move around the background of faint buildings.

The original storyboard started with a shoe spinning in space backed by heavy music, but when Sigismondi came to the job she added a human touch by shooting the faces of different Eaton’s-shoe-wearing women.

Montage artist Peter Horvath supplied the background elements, which were put together to give the spot a 1920s collage effect with modern-day appeal.

The faces of six women were shot on a green screen with blowing wind and some transitional lighting effects, while 10 pairs of shoes spun clockwise and otherwise on a rig, allowing dop Sean Valentini to capture the footwear at different angles at a variety of film speeds, also against a green screen.

When TOPIX/Mad Dog Inferno artist Susan Armstrong and Dawn Dudek viewed the boards, they picked up on the urban mood and decided to play on it, coming up with the street-signs approach to draw attention to the text, which along with the shoes was the client’s main concern.

With so much action unfolding at once, a top priority for all was to make sure each element served its purpose in the spot and got its fair share of screen time without being lost in the shuffle.

‘The challenge was coming up with and compositing all these elements in a manner that would allow the viewer to see all of the elements in the center of the screen without making it too busy or having a section where one thing has more prominence than others,’ says Armstrong.

Spot number two, ‘Closet,’ also shot on green screen, is a model-less fashion show where headless mannequins (aka Judies) roll in and out of a closet sporting an array of getups for fall.

The background sky, the same as in ‘Lucky You,’ serves to tie the two ads together while adding a little environment and a surreal element to the spot.

The folks at LairdFX set up a turntable and a dolly to allow the Judies to travel around the set. Since Eaton’s requested that no one tamper with the goods and they couldn’t put rods in the clothing, in order to produce movement a pulley system was created and two operators lay on the floor of the turntable spinning around as one operated the arms and the other looked after the waist.

‘I have never articulated a Judy before,’ says Sigismondi. ‘I have done one thing where I experimented with a human body and chopped off her legs, but this was different. I thought the clothes would look terrible just hanging in the wind and moving around with limp arms, so I decided to go with the moving and excavating the arms to make it look more human.’

Keeping in mind that the point was to show as many clothes as possible in the 30-second framework, Armstrong and the crew at t/md used Time Slicing, part of the Sapphire Spark software package for the Inferno, to make the transitions between takes of spinning clothes.

Taking three frames back in time and three frames forward in time and slicing them together, Time Slicing gives the Judies the appearance of being cut up in six pieces, which in this case delivers the illusion of the clothes being changed quickly.

Armstrong and Dudek designed the typography and art directed while t/md artists James Cooper, Patrick Coffey, Aaron Weintraub and Frank Russo spent three weeks on post effects. Michelle Czukar edited at Panic & Bob.

Janet Woods was agency producer, Linda Carter was art director, Allanna Nathanson wrote the copy. Executive producer was John Smythe and Kelly Norris produced.