‘If you’re a person who likes attention, this is one way to get it,’ says effects creator Ron Stefaniuk of the process of creating a recent spot for Tri-Mark Mutual Funds, which involved a herd of sheep-people dressed in suits marching around Toronto’s busiest street. ‘It was a traffic-stopping event.’

Stefaniuk delivered 20 sheep heads of varying capabilities for the commercial, created by Leo Burnett and directed by Kevin Donovan out of Mad Films.

The spot features urban sheep-people going about their business, providing a visual analogy for herd-investing behavior.

Stefaniuk had worked with Mad in the past and was called upon to bring a degree of humor and some character to the ruminant characters in the spot.

Stefaniuk’s studio provided one full animatronic head, four ‘mid-range’ heads with full detailing including teeth and glass eyes, and 15 background heads, which still had to closely approximate the look of the hero head.

The challenge, says Stefaniuk, was delivering the correct shape and proportion of the sheep head while still accounting for the presence of a human head as well as the animatronics (which included seven servos, a transmitter and a receiver) inside the self-contained unit.

The initial sculpture work was done in clay, with elaborate silicon molds created and injected with a hot foam product to create the skin. A Vacu-formed underskull and a metal armature which could support the animatronics were also created .

While the heads limited the vision of the sheep-people and the temperatures soared, Stefaniuk says a good sheep wrangler and good spirits made the shoot a perfect joy (except, he says, for the mind-numbing stream of original thinkers who drove past the spectacle and felt compelled to roll down their windows and shout ‘Baaa,’ to their own great amusement).