Have you ever wondered why aliens only kidnap cows and Jerry Springer guests? In the latest Canon spot, ‘What Are You Looking For?’, aliens kidnap a helpless printer, in an attempt to better understand our technologies no doubt. This being the case, perhaps the extraterrestrials should have kidnapped the director/dop on the effects-heavy commercial, Steve Gordon of Radke Films, and visual effects designer Gunnar Hensen at Voodoo Arts. What with their combined efforts on the cgi-laden ad, they could have taught those pesky, thieving aliens a thing or two.

Filming on the spot took place at Toronto’s Studioasis and was completed in only 12 hours, but the entire process from start to finish took about four weeks in March/April.

‘The way we approached the spot was kind of interesting,’ says Gordon, who set out from the beginning to utilize as many effects as possible. ‘Technology is so sophisticated these days, there is nothing that you cannot do.’

The spot involves a space craft that flies through a desert and spots a Canon printer. The alien inside the craft is so impressed with the print job the Canon is doing, he sucks the printer up into his ship and takes off, back into space.

Now, at the risk of causing a War of the Worlds-esque panic where the paranoid masses are locking their printers in nuclear fallout shelters, here is what really happened:

The spaceship was a model shot on green screen, the alien was actually a full-size puppet, and all of the backgrounds were done as map-paintings in Photoshop to give the ad a sort of an ‘eerie otherworldly’ look.

And thus Santa’s beard falls off, revealing that it’s just dad.

Hensen used Photoshop, Flint, Eddie and Softimage to create the spacey, modern sci-fi images, make the model spaceship fly three-dimensionally, and bring the puppet to life.

‘Since the alien looked like a puppet and its eyes didn’t move, we created 3D eyes which we animated in Softimage and did the eye movements and the blinking,’ says Hensen. ‘It was a puppet shot on blue screen with a puppeteer (Rob Stefaniuk) behind it, and we played around with the movement to make it more lifelike. But because the puppet didn’t move, the way to do that was to give it some blinks and eye movements.’

Gordon says Hensen’s post contributions were invaluable to the final look of the spot.

‘If I were to show you what that alien looked like compared to what you see on the screen, you wouldn’t believe it,’ says Gordon.

According to the director, there were no problems during the shooting of the spot, but he would have changed a couple of details in the production process.

‘If I could do it again, I would like to shoot in two days and do it with a motion-control rig so I could have more three-dimensional objects,’ Gordon says. ‘The space craft is a 3D object, but just by nature of all the tracking and movement that was done in post.’

Gordon is pleased with ‘What Are You Looking For?’, and says he found the challenging spot a lot of fun to work on.

‘Each and every spot has its own kind of challenges. . . and if it doesn’t have a challenge, I’d rather not do it,’ Gordon admits.

His challenge on the Canon project was exorcising much of his special-effects experience and applying it to one 30-second commercial. ‘I’ve worked with models, I’ve worked with motion control, I’ve worked with computers, but I don’t think I’ve used all of the elements together in one spot as much as this one.’

The job was out of Lackey Communications, with David Purser serving as writer/art director. Daina Liepa produced for the agency and Krista Marshall was executive producer. Kate Dale produced on behalf of Radke. Chris Parkins handled the edit at Flashcut.