Ah, the House Hippo – a pocket-sized, chip-eating, cat-scaring wonder of our time. Well, wonder no longer: The House Hippo, created by Spin Productions for a psa from Concerned Children’s Advertisers, is a collection of Hippopotami plucked from stock footage and inserted into a habitat unfamiliar to the average hippo – a suburban household.

The idea behind the spot, directed by Avion’s Tim Hamilton, is to show kids that things are not always as they seem on tv – and although there appears to be a hippopotamus living happily in someone’s home, it’s an illusion.

The House Hippo spot was a large undertaking for Spin and presented a number of challenges in getting the look just right. It was important to those involved that images of real hippos be used, so the hippos in the spot were taken from stock footage compiled from a number of suppliers. Spin executive producer Lisa Batke says it was somewhat difficult to amass usable footage.

‘We had a footage shop out of New York, Second Line Search, sourcing hippo footage from dps and from South Africa and places worldwide to try and find stuff,’ says Batke. ‘There actually isn’t a lot of hippo footage, out of the water.’

After finding enough footage to fill the needs of the spot, hippo shots were selected to move the story along. Next, it was up to Commotion artist Rob Fiumano to rotospline 40 seconds of hippos, thus removing their images from the stock footage.

Spin’s creative director on the spot, Rob Jones, says after Fiumano was finished rotosplining, the hippos were carefully pasted into some footage shot in a Toronto home.

‘After the live plates of the kitchen were shot,’ he says, ‘we had to match them up to the hippos. We also had to look for places where the feet (of the hippos) had been cut off by the shape of the ground and retouch them back in.’

For that, Spin turned to Henry artist Tina McGill, whose job it was to composite all of the material and make the spot believable. Every detail was taken into consideration.

‘We had to make the hippos all look like they were really in the environment they were in by color cast and shading and that sort of thing,’ says Jones. ‘We had to put in extra bits to make it look convincing.’

Each of the hippos featured in the spot were of different colors – some brown, some grey, some even appeared to be a shade of blue. They were all composited to match one another, giving the effect of just one hippopotamus being used in the spot. Another concern was lighting. Much of the usable footage collected by Spin’s suppliers was of hippos in the daylight, so compositing was done to make the hippo shadier and darker (because House Hippos only come out at night). Shadows also had to be added to make the hippo look as though it was actually blocking the dim light of the kitchen that evening.

There are instances where the hippo interacts with objects in the house, for example, nudging a piece of crumpled paper with its nose. In another instance near the end of the spot, the House Hippo retires for the evening, wading into its nest in a closet. The hippo leaves impressions as it walks into the nest, and the nest moves under its weight. Jones explains: ‘They basically set up a little rig of some wires to pull on the nest to make it look like it was rustling, and we had to synch that up to make it look like the hippo was nestling down into it,’ says Jones. ‘It took a bit of time to get all of the sizing right.’

The House Hippo was a creation of Publicis smw’s Malcolm Roberts, Siobhan Dempsey and David Rosenberg. Brian Noon edited the spot at Flashcut.