While wild party scenes and beautiful young people are often centre stage in beer commercials, this year’s Top Spot winner shines the spotlight on a creepy crustacean.

‘Lobster’ made its television debut during the Super Bowl and tells the story of a frightened, yet brave, little lobster who wraps his claws around a bottle of Budweiser beer and takes it hostage in a successful bid to escape the pot of boiling water. The spot won the 1999 Cannes Silver Lion.

The :60 was created out of ddb Needham, Chicago, it was shot by m.e.a.t. director David McNally through his u.s. prodco Omaha Pictures and John Schwartzman was dop. David Baxter edited at Panic & Bob, Diana D’Amelio was producer at Topix/Mad Dog and inferno artists Patrick Coffey and Frank Russo handled the special effects and animation.

Patrick Knoll wrote the spot and says the idea behind the creative was to treat Bud as the ‘king of beers,’ put it in a good light and elevate the drinker.

‘By taking the beer hostage, the lobster is showing the value of it because everybody is freaking out, they don’t want him to break it,’ explains Knoll. ‘It’s a hostage situation. We thought, `What would be the most valuable thing he could take hostage?’ and that was the Budweiser.’

The lobster itself was an animatronic, which meant it was up to the guys at topix/Mad Dog to look after the rig removal and create some animation, such as the eyelids that blink open when the lobster is snatched from his tank. According to executive producer Sylvain Taillon, it should have been a simple task only it didn’t quite turn out that way.

For starters, the Inferno artists were counting on the fact that the shots containing the lobster would be locked-off, which makes their job of rig removal painless. However, when it came down to the shoot, it just didn’t look right to have no motion at all in the shots, so what they ended up having to work with were pictures with lots of motion.

‘Creatively it would not have looked as good if he [McNally] did do it all locked off,’ says Taillon. ‘Picture a lobster moving in the scene. . . from a cinematic point of view, it makes more sense that the camera would be moving because if you were part of that scene you wouldn’t be standing still.’

If the shots had been motionless, the process would have been a simple one: shoot the scene with everything in it, remove everything from the environment and shoot the same thing again. Next, using the take with nothing in it, Russo and Coffey would paint back certain elements, cover the wires controlling the lobster, while keeping the elements they wanted. But, when the camera is moving, every single frame is different, making the job much more challenging.

With the Super Bowl fast approaching and the schedule already tight to begin with, the inferno artists got comfy in the Flame Suite and took the footage through a plethora of techniques – and a lot of trial and error. And, just as things started to take shape, a transformer blew in downtown Toronto, leaving them with no power for several hours followed by – when the power came back – a round-the-clock lobster marathon.

‘I would rather have the director tell the story his way. We can do anything as long as we have the time to do it – and we got it all done and done well,’ says Coffey. ‘Everybody says, `What did you guys do on it?’ and that is the biggest compliment. Nobody can find where those wires were, and with a job like this, when people can’t tell what you did, you did a really good job.’