The Animation House, the Toronto-based commercial division of Evening Sky Productions, has combined still photography, animation and live action on a pair of tv spots for Kraft Pourables Salad Dressing. According to Animation House’s Michael Crabtree, who produced and codirected the ads for agency Leo Burnett, the campaign has been well received.

‘In Kraft’s research after the fact, apparently [the spots] are right off the scale as far as recognition goes,’ he says.

The concept behind the campaign was to ‘paint’ idyllic summer scenarios on a blank canvas using salad ingredients including vegetables, nuts, and fruits, which appear onscreen one at a time.

The first spot, ‘Dock,’ evokes a Georgian Bay setting, with a beach, cottage, pine trees, and a couple of tiny figures and their dog on a pier. Each element is constructed from such photographed veggies as tomatoes, lettuce, broccoli, spinach, chili peppers, eggplant, olives, garlic, celery, carrots and mushrooms. A bottle of Kraft salad dressing enters the frame and pours out what becomes a lake; one of the veggie-figures leaps in and the pooch barks its approval.

The second spot, ‘Balloon,’ adopts an appropriately airy feel to sell its particular product – Kraft Light Done Right dressings. The ad makes mountains out of cabbages, a hot-air balloon out of an orange slice, and clouds out of Kraft dressing. (The bottles and dressing were modeled and animated by post house toybox under the supervision of creative director Derek Grime.) Vegetable figures of a mother and child watch on a hill as the father sends another child on a balloon trip, and the others wave from below.

Both spots end with the entire image seemingly exploding toward the camera, the elements then landing to form a perfect tossed salad. A bottle of the dressing falls onto the salad bed, and then centre-wipes to show the other product flavors available.

Producer Laura St. Amour, writer/ associate creative director Mark Fitzgerald and art director Clarke Smith from Leo Burnett conceived the two scenarios, and then Animation House brought them to life.

Crabtree explains how his codirector, Bob Fortier, ‘did the layout, researching every salad book he could get a hold of.’

The next step for Animation House was to map out the composition for the vegetable tableaus.

‘We had a pretty good idea of what we were going to be using to represent trees, rocks and foreground foliage,’ Fortier says. ‘One of the things we had to do in terms of compositing was play with size relationships to create as much depth and integration as possible. The challenge was to keep the salad ingredients looking as appetizing as possible, but also to create the visual images to make it all come together.’

While the filmmakers didn’t concern themselves with keeping the size of the vegetables to scale, stills photographer Michael Mahovlich had to be careful when lighting the produce.

‘They had to be photographed in such a way that the lighting was true to the composition and that they worked well when put side-by-side to the other elements,’ Crabtree says. ‘It was all done on Fuji 120 transparency film, so the resolution was incredible. They were scanned high-res, so we had the option of making the elements large or keeping them small when we imported them into the system.’

Once the images were in the computer, they were manipulated for shadow enhancement and chroma adjustment with Adobe Photoshop, while compositing and further enhancement was performed with Adobe After Effects.

Although the Animation House team had a good idea of what they wanted prior to photography, they also took some new directions once the jigsaw puzzle of images was in front of them. They credit Dennis Wood, the food stylist on the piece, with supplying them with so many options.

‘He went over the top as far as arriving with a real variety of things that could be used for trees and textured elements like the land,’ Crabtree says. ‘We shot everything that might resemble a tree so that ultimately we could make that decision when we were putting this thing together.’

For the animated vegetable figures, Animation House brought in stop-motion director Philip Marcus, who specializes in media such as clay and plasticine.

‘He visualized the figures and composed very much out-of-scale because he was making them out of peppers and things,’ Crabtree explains. ‘But he had the [foresight] that once they were shot and brought into scale – arms and legs to torsos – they would work as figures, and they did.’

The sequence with the vegetables exploding to camera and the Kraft bottle falling was shot live action by cinematographer Derek Case of Generator Films, using a high-speed camera from California manufacturer Photo-Sonics.

Crabtree points out it would have been impossible to have the vegetables fall back to earth and just happen to form a perfect salad.

‘We had to start with the ‘beauty’ salad, explode it to camera [with an air canon underneath] and then run it in reverse. But when you do that, things are folding in and look unnatural in the last few frames of its resolution.’

To distract the viewer from ‘seeing the strings,’ Animation House constructed a few 3D vegetables which pop up at the screen, using the NewTek LightWave animation system.

The bottle falling on the salad bed was achieved with a mechanical rig so the bottle would end up in the centre of the frame. The three other salad dressing bottles were then shot in the same position so they could swap out in the final version.

Total production time on ‘Dock’ and ‘Balloon’ was eight weeks, and both spots are currently airing nationally.