Pascal Blais producer Howard Huxham and team spent 25 weeks cooking up Lunchables’ ‘Breakfast Machine’ spot.

On paper, ‘Breakfast Machine,’ is made of stop-motion clay animation, but Huxham explains there is much more to the 30-second ad than that.

‘This is sort of a hybrid technique that we have done, combining clay, silicone, latex, plastics and real sets,’ Huxham says. He adds that great care went into making the sets, comprised of wood, metals, plastics and materials used to construct normal sized sets. ‘We have a prop constructor who worked for four or five weeks just building all of the miniature props and sets and window frames, bolts, screws and nuts that put the whole thing together.’

The fully animated spot, codirected by Pascal Blais and Denis Roy, features an inventive father (a la Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang) who is diligently trying to put together a complicated breakfast-making machine. It is going disastrously when his son arrives and shows his dad that it’s easier to use Lunchables breakfast combos. The father is oblivious and continues to wrestle with his toaster.

With ‘Breakfast Machine’ being the third ad in the Pascal Blais/Lunchables campaign, the puppet characters were showing wear. Foam latex is notorious for leaving signs of creasing. Silicone, on the other hand, is seamless and washable,’ says Huxham. So, for the new spot, the skin of the puppets had to be changed from foam latex to silicone.

First off, however, the team had a short amount of time to manufacture high-precision, stainless steel armatures, which are basically the skeletons of the puppets. ‘The armatures are a ball and socket and have to be machined to within a thousandth of an inch in accuracy. Any discrepancy in fitting or friction within the joint will cause the armature to fail during the animation.’

Once the armatures were constructed, the animators sculpted with clay over the bones of the character and cast it in a silicone mold. This is where the trouble-shooting really began.

‘Silicone is a natural lubricant so once the puppet is in the silicone, all of a sudden the armature starts to loosen up and become a lot more flexible,’ says Huxham. ‘We had to determine a way to prevent the silicone from touching the stainless steel ball and socket joints to prevent them from over-lubricating during the animation. We had a team of eight people working around the clock for four weeks trying to come up with a solution,’ Huxham says. That solution was found in a spray paint product that was sprayed onto the armatures, leaving a thin layer of Teflon that provided a buffer between the skeleton and the silicone.

Huxham says that although one of the main thrusts of Pascal Blais’ business is commercial animation, the company has been branching off into other areas in the past few years, having produced an award-winning television special in The Old Lady and the Pigeons and the imax film The Old Man and the Sea, which has already premiered at large-format screen venues in London, New York, France and Toronto.