Some say the best post work goes virtually undetected, and Flashcut Editing’s Norm Odell might agree. Toronto-based editor Odell is largely responsible for the post-production and editing on the Clearnet campaign from Taxi Advertising, headed up by creative director Paul Lavoie.

The Clearnet spots, for the two or three of you who have not seen them, feature various animals – from parrots to frogs to scampering hooded lizards – out of their element on a white background. The ads have aired on tv and in movie theatres across Canada for several years now, the most recent featuring a disco-ing duck. To the untrained eye the spots may appear to be the product of a lucky director sitting around long enough to capture some unique moments. Not the case, according to Flashcut gm Mary Beth Odell.

‘I almost always have Clearnet on our reel, because it is a perfect example of something done really well in post,’ says Mary Beth Odell. ‘They look simple, like there is [little post work] in them. Sometimes when I screen them people say, ‘Why do you have that on the reel – it looks like three or four shots?’ But do you really think animals will do that in that time frame?’

Norm Odell knows the answer to that question all too well. The editor has spent hours cutting and pasting bits and pieces of director/dop Shin Sugino’s footage from the various Clearnet shoots in an effort to make ordinary animals do extraordinary things. He cites the example of the hooded dragon in the ‘Shopping Dragon’ Clearnet ad, where the lizard spends much of its time running about frantically on its hind legs.

‘A lot of what [agency Taxi] wanted the lizard to do was not in its repertoire of movement, which made it very challenging,’ says Norm Odell, who is busily putting together a new, unrelated snowboarding spot. ‘You don’t want to morph everything because you’ll see through it. The best thing to do is take something indigenous to the animal’s movement and work around that as the centerpiece. The other great plus is that they may do something unexpected.’

For the Clearnet ‘Frog’ spot, perhaps the most famous of the campaign, Odell had to rework the images of his star and fiddle with the film’s speed due to the small amphibian’s amazing quickness. He says he could see early on that ‘Frog’ would be a challenge both to shoot and edit.

‘In a meeting, the trainer put the frog on my hand, and the next moment he was on my shoulder,’ Odell recounts. ‘It requires something like a 600-frame-per-second camera to capture that kind of movement. That in itself is challenging.’

In the finished spot, a frog that appears to be trapped in a jar maneuvers his way out and leaps about, dramatically celebrating his freedom. Seems simple enough despite the animal’s quickness, but the editor says much post work was invested to get the spot to match Taxi’s boards.

‘The trainer knew what [the frog’s] habit of movement would be – he would climb up on the rim and perch there before [jumping off],’ says Odell. ‘With high-speed film that whole bit translated into five minutes of footage, so I had to take a leg from an earlier part of the take, and take a hand, then speed-ramp those movements. In places where I got stuck, I just had to make one point in time match up with another point in time through a morphing process. It looked great – it looked like he just did it, but in actual fact he took about five minutes [to jump].’

Odell says each spot brought its own particular challenges. He agonized over ‘Relaxed Lizard,’ ‘Love Frog’ and ‘Yappy Bird’ for days – often weeks – before being satisfied with the images on his monitor. In one instance, the ‘Birthday Bug’ ad, which features a ladybug climbing a candle, some quick thinking by the trainer on set, and Odell, provided the look and image Taxi asked for. Ladybugs only like to travel upwards, and they apparently detest Vic’s Vapo-Rub, so when the ladybug reached the top of the lit candle and appeared to blow it out, it was actually the trainer out of frame blowing Vic’s Vapo-Rub through a straw at the bug, making it halt and take a quick step backwards. Odell took it from there in post:

‘When the ladybug gets to the top and takes what appears to be a backwards kind of move, I reverse print it so he comes back like this is natural, then I reprint it forward so it looks like he blows out the candle. Then I print him forward again, and because he doesn’t like the Vics Vapo-Rub, he actually went down the candle again.’

Disco duck

The campaign’s latest spot is ‘Duck,’ which also appears cut-and-dried on the surface. Created by the Taxi team of Terry Drummond and Alan Madill, with Louise Blouin producing (who have provided the creative on many of the Clearnet spots), the ad features a boogie-ing white duck. At one point the bird reaches under its wing and grabs a Clearnet prepaid calling card in its bill. Odell says for that shot in particular a lot of cutting and pasting of the duck’s body parts had to be done to get the image correct, employing techniques similar to those used for ‘Frog.’

‘The duck wouldn’t carry that card in its wing, and when he was doing his movements we had to make his neck crane down like he was making a move for his wing,’ Odell explains. ‘I took two takes and then morphed them. I took the head from one take and put it onto the body from another take and then he’d start to make the dive in the wide shot so it would match up in the tight one. Stuff like that looks quite natural – you just have to have a sense of where it’s going.’

Mary Beth Odell says because of the uncompromising nature of Taxi’s boards, even elements beyond the animals were challenging. In ‘Duck,’ special care had to be taken so the white duck would not come across as just a pair of eyes and a bill over the white background.

‘Taxi felt for the Clearnet ‘look’ it had to be white on white,’ she says. ‘The background is still white, but it has just a bit of green in it so that there is separation.’

Norm Odell reports he enjoyed collaborating with the team assembled to keep the seven Clearnet spots visually arresting and distinct, and he gives a lot of the credit to Inferno artist Jeff Campbell of Command Post/toybox, who worked closely with Flashcut on the ads. He also credits Taxi and the client for their willingness to let the post-heavy spots evolve, leaving room for experimentation where necessary.

‘Clearnet is interested in both getting a very good spot that communicates well and seeing the job evolve to a higher plain,’ says Odell. ‘The work is [mapped out] to begin with – it is scripted, planned and shot, and things will happen in the course of doing all that that sometimes can make the spot better.’ *